“We had this guy attached to us called Chuchella, it means scarecrow in Russian.
He got attached to us about half way thru my deployment to Chechnya. We were VDV and he was a GRU operative but the dude was real scary. In Russia it’s pretty common to wear a balaclava or scarf or face wrap because it’s cold and it keeps the wind out of your face. But it’s one thing to wear one, and it’s another to never take it off. I mean I legitimately never saw this man take off his face wrap

He even slept with it, and he wore a Gorka suit so he almost always had his hood on. The guy was crazy, he never really said anything to anyone but whenever we would catch a survivor from a skirmish he would “interrogate” them by taking them up to the Domas (apartments). You could always hear the guys screaming so we’d move our camp a little bit further out.

One time my platoon Sgt had enough and he made us pick up camp in the middle of the night and move like five clicks away. We didn’t tell anyone over the radio or anything and we hid inside a building in the middle of this blown up city. We didn’t even hide from the enemy, we hid from him.

Well it didn’t matter. We woke up to him staring at all of us in the entranceway to the building we were sleeping in. He had knocked out the two guys on door sentry and he just stood there, eyeing us all down like we were fu*king meat to him. I’ve never been more sure that a single man could take on a room of soldiers and win.

Needless to say, our platoon Sgt was relieved of duty when we got back to the base and that shook up the platoon, and also put me in a leadership position. One of the only things this guy ever said to me was ‘Human flesh is a lot like pate, it’s soft and malleable. I don’t need special instruments to cut, I have my whet stone and my spoons.’

And no shit this guy had a little mat with sharpened spoons that were almost razor sharp, along with a bunch of needle and thread. He explained to me that he liked slicing a finger a piece at a time, and then sewing the cut closed just so someone could feel the pain over and over again while losing very little blood. Fu*k Chuchella”
– Anonymous Former Russian Soldier. Beta Company, 218th Battalion, 45th Independent Guard Brigade. VDV. Second Chechen War, 2008