Russian anti-slavery activist disappears trying to bring woman and children out of rebel-held Syria
A Russian vigilante activist who freed hundreds of people from slavery has gone missing while trying to bring a woman and two children out of rebel-held areas in Syria.
Oleg Melnikov, 28, founder of the anti-slavery group Alternativa, left Turkey for the Idlib province of Syria late on Wednesday, his colleague Maxim Vaganov told The Telegraph. He missed planned calls at 9am, 12pm and 3pm on Thursday, after which Mr Vaganov followed the group's policy and informed the media and the Russian embassy that he had disappeared.
Mr Melnikov, who had been to government-held Aleppo to look for missing children last month, had not been heard from on Friday either. His last check-in on social media was at 1:42am on Thursday.
Mr Vaganov has also been unable to reach local acquaintances guiding Mr Melnikov, who is married with two small children.
“There are lots of rebel groups, and the one that's helping us is helping us, but information could have gotten out, and others could have decided to gain possession of him or kill him,” he said. “But I don't know for now.”
He had previously gone to rebel-held Syria in 2013 to try to free a Russian blogger captured by Islamic militants while hitchhiking.
Moscow's air force and special forces troops have turned the tide of the war in Syria in favour of Bashar Assad's regime, while thousands of militants from Russia and neighbouring countries joined jihadi forces there.
The Russian foreign ministry said it had asked Damascus about the activist's disappearance.
The leader of Russia's Chechnya region has returned more than 20 local women and 100 children who lived with militants Syria and Iraq, but Mr Melnikov and Mr Vaganov had a different mission.
The pair arrived in the Middle East in July to try to free several women from the former Soviet Union who were married to local men and had complained that they were being kept in “domestic slavery” in Syria and Lebanon.
“They move there, and gradually a situation arises where the men have several wives, or a big family, and they force (the women) to work at home and exploit them,” Mr Vaganov said. “The husband says if you leave you won't get to see your children.”
A woman from Kazakhstan with two children had appealed to Alternativa for help getting out of rebel-held Idlib province. She had moved there with her husband to live with his relatives, but was trapped after the war escalated and the father abandoned the family, he said.
“Oleg decided to start with the hardest case, in Idlib, and then the easier stuff,” said Mr Vaganov, who was unable to accompany Mr Melnikov to Syria after he came down with bronchitis and dislocated a rib.
Mr Melnikov also hoped to investigate the conditions in which captured pro-Assad soldiers were being held, he added.
Funded largely out of Mr Melnikov's pocket and responding to online tips or phone calls, Alternativa has freed at least 500 people from exploitative situations in Russia with its unique brand of vigilante activism.
“We act with legal and sometimes not very legal methods, and we have a big percent of successful operations,” Mr Melnikov previously told the Telegraph. “We're not simple volunteers, we can fight back.”
Many of those liberated had been offered work or drugged in Moscow train stations and then bussed to the southern region of Dagestan, where their documents were taken from them and they were forced to work on farms or rural brick factories for little or no money.
More than 1 million people are being held against their will in Russia, according to Australian-based NGO Walk Free.
Alternativa activists typically bypass law enforcement, attempting to spirit people away before their captors realise what's going on, but have sometimes clashed with corrupt cops and come to blows with owners.
“We have one golden hour. We should have already left by the time that golden hour ends,” Mr Melnikov said. “But if we take away the owner's phone, and he is handcuffed to the radiator, then we have plenty of time.”
The hard-charging Mr Melnikov is known for both his exploits with Alternativa and colourful personal history.
After being raided by police for participating in the Bolotnaya Square protests against Vladimir Putin in 2012, he went to eastern Ukraine in 2014 to fight alongside Russia-backed separatists. There he helped negotiate exchanges of prisoners and dead soldiers between the two sides, switching his attention to modern-day slavery on his return to Russia.
In recent years, Alternativa began helping women forced into prostitution in the Middle East and child labourers in Africa. With a knack for showing up at historical turning points, Mr Melnikov was trying to free exploited workers in cooperation with Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe when the longtime leader was overthrown in 2017.
“We have a principle that children should study and neither children nor adults should be exploited,” Mr Melnikov said. “If the situation is different then we come and fix it.”
