Police apologized to Valko for the beating after his arrest.

The Kuban district police department sent Fyodor Valko an official apology for the brutal beating he suffered at the hands of police officers. The apology was sent only after a request from lawyers, human rights activists noted.

As reported by the "Caucasian Knot," Fyodor Valko, a security guard from the Prikubansky village, was detained by police in August 2023 on suspicion of theft from a factory. While extracting a confession, officers beat him, including with a chair, until he lost consciousness. Doctors diagnosed him with three fractured vertebrae, abrasions, bruises, and a hemorrhage in the eye. In December 2023, Valko reported that four months later, the aftereffects of the beating were interfering with his work.

Police apologized to Fyodor Valko "in connection with the violation of his rights by police officers," the human rights organization "Team Against Torture" (included in the register of foreign agents) reported today on its Telegram channel, citing an official letter from the Krasnoarmeysky District Department of Internal Affairs to the victim.

"The department's leadership did not want to apologize proactively, as required by law, and sent an official letter only after a request from lawyers," the human rights activists reported. A photocopy of the letter is not attached to this publication.

As a reminder, in May 2025, a court found police officers Yevgeny Samonov and Ivan Tatsenko guilty of beating Fyodor Valko. Samonov, the district police officer, received four years, and Tatsenko, the detective, received three and a half years in prison. Both denied their guilt and claimed that the injuries to Valko were unintentional.

The prosecutor's office requested seven years in prison for them. The court justified the lenient sentence by saying the defendants had no "desire to inflict particular suffering on the victim." Human rights activists considered the court's interpretation erroneous, arguing that the court qualified the police officers' actions under the more lenient section of the law on abuse of power, "excluding torture from the charges."

The prosecutor's office demanded a harsher sentence, but the Krasnodar Regional Court upheld it in September.