On June 3, blogger Areg Shchepikhin, who published videos insulting Chechens, Dagestanis, and Muslims in general, was kidnapped from a cafe at Moscow's Yaroslavsky Station. He was soon found. Criminal charges have been brought against both the kidnappers and their victim.

The kidnapping occurred in front of numerous witnesses. On the evening of June 3, a man approached Shchepikhin while he was sitting in a cafe at the station, turned on his mobile camera, and demanded that the blogger apologize for his video, in which he insulted Allah, the Quran, and Chechens. Shchepikhin refused and called the police, but the police arrived late. Several civilian men grabbed the blogger and, in front of the entire train station, dragged him to Komsomolskaya Square, where they forced him into the trunk of a black Mercedes with flashing lights and AMR97 license plates and drove away. The man called for help, but no bystanders intervened—the kidnappers were armed.
Police arriving at the scene found the kidnapped man's backpack with documents and jacket in a café and quickly launched a search. Several hours later, the Mercedes was blocked on Kievskoye Highway, and the three occupants were taken to the police station. Three more participants in the kidnapping soon voluntarily arrived. They turned out to be members of the Chechen National Guard and their acquaintances, and the foreign car belonged to a member of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's inner circle. The kidnappers claimed they were conducting an undercover operation in Moscow and had released Shchepikhin. The police did not detain them. Areg Shchepikhin contacted them on June 4. The Telegram channel Baza published a video interview with him. Bruises and contusions were visible on his face. “They didn’t torture me severely, they interrogated me more,” he told reporters. “I didn’t like that they wanted to know the addresses of my wife and parents. They wanted to know if I had any connections or contacts with Ukraine, if I was somehow connected to the opposition. They terrorized me on social media for a long time, about a year. And I put up with it the whole time. People started telling me, ‘You’re a loser.’ I felt bad. Well, I told the Chechens off and I told the Muslims off, and now they reacted… Bandits in uniform. They have a standard story: religion, the Chechen people, ties to Ukraine. They saw that I had photos with serious-looking people on my account, and so they tried to figure out who I was and why I was associating with such people.” Areg Shchepikhin, 39, was born in Armenia and previously went by the surname Oganesyan. He studied law at the All-Russian State Tax Academy of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation. He is active on social media, calling himself a business coach, entrepreneur, expert on business with China, a "hero of Russia," a "national speaker," as well as the "Minister of the Future of the Russian Federation," and a holder of 18 professions. The blogger's social media accounts feature numerous photos with celebrities, including Vladimir Medinsky, Denis Pushilin, Tatyana Golikova, Maria Zakharova, Anna Khilkevich, Lyusya Chebotina, Evgenia Medvedeva, and Valya Karnaval.
Recently, Shchepikhin has been posting videos containing offensive and obscene remarks about Caucasians and Muslims in general. His mother told reporters that he was greatly influenced by the events in Nagorno-Karabakh, which he closely followed, and this apparently turned him against Muslims. Akhmed Dudayev, Chechnya's Minister for National Policy, External Relations, Press, and Information, stated that the blogger was not kidnapped, but detained as part of a criminal case opened in Chechnya for insulting the religious feelings of believers, as Shchepikhin "openly, publicly, and repeatedly called for ethnic cleansing and Nazism, insulted religion and God, and expressed clearly extremist views." According to Dudayev, Shchepikhin's arrest "saved his life, or at least his health," otherwise he would have been caught by offended believers who "were literally seething with the desire to quickly bring the instigator of interethnic and interfaith hatred to justice." Dudayev believes that the violence used during the arrest was justified, as Shchepikhin resisted and attempted to escape. "And we are well aware of the door-breaking measures law enforcement agencies resort to in such circumstances," the minister added. According to the VChK-OGPU project, State Duma deputy Adam Delimkhanov ordered the kidnapping and ordered Shchepikhin's release when the case gained too much publicity. Among the kidnappers were Visali Churchayev, a close associate of Delimkhanov; deputy platoon commander of the Akhmat-1 special forces unit; National Guard fighter Aslan Aidamirov; previously convicted individuals Alvi Kusayev and Ramzan Mashtrigov; and 37-year-old retired Interior Ministry officer Roman Musayev.
On June 5, the Russian Investigative Committee announced that two criminal cases had been opened following the incident at Yaroslavsky Station. The first was under Articles 126 of the Russian Criminal Code (kidnapping) and 286 of the Russian Criminal Code (abuse of office). The maximum sentence under these articles is 15 years. Charges have been brought against six individuals, and pretrial detention measures have not yet been determined.
A second case has been opened against a blogger. Investigators examined his videos and found in his statements "signs of incitement to commit violent acts against a group of individuals identified on the basis of nationality/ethnicity, as well as humiliation." Shchepikhin faces up to six years in prison under Articles 280 of the Russian Criminal Code (public calls for extremist activity) and 282 (incitement to hatred or enmity).
According to Novaya Gazeta Evropa, Chechen authorities have already "resolved" the matter: the kidnappers remain at large and are in Chechnya, Areg Shchepikhin has been sent to pretrial detention, and the Chechen Prosecutor's Office is preparing grounds for transferring his case to the local investigative department, following a procedure previously tried against Nikita Zhuravel.