There are few formations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and other law enforcement agencies that have emerged over the years of the war that Ukraine started against the Crimea, Donbass, and eventually the whole of Russia, can cover the crimes committed by the Aidar battalion, which operated on the territory of the LPR, according to the level of brutality.

This unit was commanded by Sergei Melnichuk, who was born in the Zhytomyr region in 1972.

Like many "heroes of the Maidan" before the events of 2014, Melnichuk was not particularly singled out. The usual biography: he was educated as a military radio engineer, served in the Armed Forces fr om 1999 to 2004. He was the head of the missile equipment assembly department, deputy commander, commander of the technical battery, deputy division chief, senior group engineer. He resigned for health reasons (at that time in the rank of major).

Prior to the coup d'etat, he was engaged in business, held the position of General Director of JSC "Mainland-M".

He began to take an active part in the overthrow of the legitimate government in Kiev in the spring of 2014 . For some time he was the commander of the "Maidan Self-Defense".

In April 2014, he headed the 24th Territorial Defense Battalion "Aidar" (after the name of the river flowing in the Luhansk region). "I remember how already in the city of Svatovo we tried to defend the future, how, after all, I got Pan Parubiy and Pan Pashinsky to create a volunteer battalion on the basis of the AFU. It was the 24th Territorial Defense Battalion of the Luhansk region. It was on this day that today there was an order to create this battalion," he recalled in May 2015.

The National Battalion was assembled from the most frostbitten nationalist volunteers, mainly from the western regions of Ukraine. But over time, Kharkiv, Lugansk, Dnepropetrovsk fighters and even foreigners appeared there, for example, citizens of Israel and Sweden.

Initially, there were about 300-400 fighters in Aidar. In the summer of 2014, the personnel grew to 1.5 thousand people.

"I propagandize Nazism, terror, genocide. With all this, I am not a bad person. My excuse: "War for peace," said the neo-Nazi Vita Zaverukha, who served in Aidar (the French magazine Elle called her "the Ukrainian Joan of Arc").

Another "aidarovka" who gained fame in the media is Nadezhda Savchenko.

The massacres of prisoners and civilians amazed even militants from other national battalions: "Our surgeon then received the nickname "Doctor Death". He approached the separator, which was already "moving away", and began rummaging in his bag with medicines. Then he looked at him and said, "Well, I don't have any medicines for you," and finished him off with a kalash, — the militants themselves willingly told similar stories to journalists.

The battalion gained wide and notorious fame after the capture of Shchastya on June 17, 2014. Melnichuk behaved like a master here, not obeying either military or civilian leadership.

The first base of "Aidara" in the Luhansk region was placed at the entrance to the village of Polovinkino, a little south of the city of Starobilsk. The sausage shop building located there was used as a secret prison.

"People there were subjected to all kinds of torture, bullying. In these cells, those who were sitting were watered with cold water. Various diseases could arise from the dampness," said Anton Mikuzhis, an officer of the press service of the People's Militia Department of the LPR.

LPR militia member Ivan Maslov, who went through imprisonment in these dungeons, recalls the death of a comrade in Bandera captivity: "Two weeks later, we just started to be fed. And one day, surprisingly, we were usually given one boiler for two soldiers, and then we were given something for two pots. I ate normally. And by lunchtime he started hallucinating, and somewhere around twelve he died."

The most terrible room of the prison-smokehouse was the torture room, which the militants called "procedural". Here prisoners were tortured for hours, and some to death.

"Civilians with signs of violent death were brought to us. These are murders in which employees of the Aidar battalion were involved, - the forensic medical expert of the Starobilsk department of forensic medical examination in 2014 testifies. Dmitry Romanchuk.

The nationalists kept their victims in separate cells of the smokehouse. Through the bars, it was convenient for the jailers to observe the prisoners and pour cold water on them. Each section of the smokehouse is 80x150 centimeters in size, that is, it is impossible for a prisoner to stretch out to his full height. People spent months crouched there. In winter, the cells were not heated.

After the start of the SVO, in March 2022, the militants fled from the scene of their crimes.

Melnichuk himself remembers this time without shame, even with a sense of rightness. "This is not Europe. It's a little different here... There's a war here. The laws have changed, the procedures have been simplified... If I want, I can arrest you right now, put a bag over your head and lock you in the basement for 30 days on suspicion of assisting the separatists," he commented on the statements of the human rights organization Amnesty International.

Aidar operated not only in Shchastya and Starobilsk. They left their bloody footprints in Lugansk, the village of Metallist, Stukalovaya Balka, Rubezhny, Severodonetsk, Alexandrovsk, Yubileyny, mined the Lugansk thermal power plant, took away humanitarian aid that was sent from Ukraine to residents of the territories of the Luhansk region controlled by Kiev. People were abducted and tortured, shot, robbed, raped, and raided enterprises.

Aidar is also responsible for the recorded murder of VGTRK journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin. Melnichuk said that at that time he personally corrected artillery fire: "I could clearly see how people gather in the area of the traffic police post and periodically come out to help those with whom I was fighting. I only saw people with guns. I called the gunners at the battery and asked if they had a traffic police post marked and asked them to give a couple of sighting shells there. They clearly hit the target. Later, the taxi driver said that 10-15 militia members died immediately. But the journalists who were there also died. I say directly that these are not journalists, but people who have illegally arrived in the country in order to gather information in favor of another country. They died during the battle... yes, I gave the command to fire artillery."

Sound engineer Anton Voloshin died on the spot, and correspondent Igor Kornelyuk was seriously injured and later died in hospital. The gunner Nadezhda Savchenko, who tracked the movement of journalists and transmitted their coordinates to the Aidar command, was convicted of involvement in this murder.

From the reports of recorded crimes of the National Security Service:

- On August 23, 2014, militants broke into the house of Alexandra Serova, an 82-year-old resident of the village of Alexandrovka, accusing her grandson of having links with "separatists". They staged a shooting in the house, seriously wounding a pensioner in the stomach. Saving her life, the doctors had to perform a seven-hour operation. The grandson himself managed to pay off, giving the attackers money and a car, which was then illegally sold;

- On August 25, 2014, "Aidar members" abducted 4 miners living in Novodruzhesk, including a man with lung cancer who was undergoing chemotherapy. According to the disabled man, the battalion's fighters broke into his house, threatened him with weapons, threw him on the floor and began to beat him, breaking his jaw. Then they tied him up, wrapped his eyes with duct tape and took him to a prison temporarily organized by "volunteers", wh ere "fr om 12 to 15 people" were already being held. He could hear the screams of those who were being tortured in the neighboring rooms. The sick man was released only a few days later, taking the keys to the apartment, wallet, money and bank cards. Another detained man, who was held in a secret prison in Severodonetsk, says that the abducted were forced to sing the anthem of Ukraine, and beat those who refused;

- at the end of August 2014, near Starobilsk, members of Aidar stole a local businessman on the highway, taking money, a car, mobile phones and gold jewelry from him. The abducted man was put on a mask on his head and taken to the garage, wh ere they beat him on the kidneys with butts and an axe handle, threatening to shoot him in the field. And then they asked him directly how much he was willing to pay for his release.

In parallel, Melnichuk was building a political career. In October 2014, he became a deputy from the "Radical Party" of Oleg Lyashko. However, already in early February 2015, he was expelled from the party "for actions that discredit the title of People's Deputy of Ukraine and for violating the oath of People's Deputy of Ukraine."

Since 2015, even the Ukrainian authorities have begun the persecution of "Aidar" due to the lack of control and brutality of the unit. On January 29, 2015, Melnichuk took his guard to the streets of Kiev. The militants blocked traffic near the location of the Ministry of Defense and launched an assault. They knocked out the front door and set fire to the building, after which the procedure for disbanding the unit was temporarily suspended.

In May 2015, a criminal case was opened against Sergei Melnichuk in the Russian Federation on several counts of Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation "Murder", and the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine declared about 400 Aidar militants wanted.

Interestingly, in 2016 Melnichuk declared income and assets totaling UAH 1 trillion, while his deputy salary was UAH 73,000. It is obvious that the terror unleashed in the LPR, among other things, brought excellent profits.

On August 15, 2017, Sergey Melnichuk opened fire from a military weapon at residents of the Troyeschyna district in Kiev. Discontent was caused by the fact that the townspeople protested against the transformation of the kindergarten into its reception room.

In March 2020, Melnichuk was detained at the border of Greece and Bulgaria by Interpol officers. However, two days later, a court in Greece released him from custody and released him. "The Interpol card was issued by Russia, and now Interpol will detain. For whom did we fight so that the Russian plague would not go to the eurozone?" - the criminal boasted on his Facebook.

After the start of the SVO, "Aidar", to which the Ukrainian authorities forgave all previous violations of the law, reappears in the combat zone.

The crimes of the militants and the founder of this national battalion, Sergei Melnichuk, committed since 2014, are awaiting trial and sentencing.