these days shock videos are just a few clicks away and far too easy to access. now you can easily surf through sub-reddits, random gorr sites for your morbid curiosity, or if you are a weird person like me who will go through the history, background, lore instead of just watching them and feeling ‘edgy’ by consuming bloody videos.

well it wasn’t just as easy to watch these videos back in 90s and 00s when the internet was still in its infancy.
when it was still growing the layouts of the website, pretty basic and bland.
and you couldn’t really post smth with a very long essay attached to it.

to understand the history of shock sites and disturbing content on the internet..
we have to go back to the year 1996, in that year, a shock site by the name of “rotten(dot)com” went live and lacking by today's standards.

it was pretty much the first site of its kind. well, i will talk about this topic some another day but one of the prominent sources of material for such sites were the first and second chechen wars.
these conflicts produced well known disturbing tapes such as Dagestan massacre tape, chechclear and many more.

tapes which people still discuss about to this day, and these videos are almost 30 years old.
despite the brutality, the chechen wars are rarely discussed by mainstream western media,
it's estimated that somewhere between 150k-300k were killed during both wars combined,
war is definitely, hell!

chechen rebels viewed the execution videos as a viable tactic to spread fear on amongst their enemies and dehumanize themselves.

much like we've seen from modern day mexican cartels, and various terrorist organisations in the years since the chechens.

upon capturing russian soldiers, they wanted execute them usually by decapitation and these acts would be filmed on camera and very often the rebels would leave the tape on the victim's body, so, their colleagues would find the body as well as the tapes.

many of these tapes ware traded the black market as snuff films in chechnya-dagestan region.
an example of this would be the dagestan massacre video..
originally it was being sold in the city of Grozny, it was found in the year 2000 by Russian Security services, many of these tapes used to circulate as snuff films sold physically or online, particularly on ogrish(dot)com.

one of these lesser known video went by the title of OFEX..
much like the chechclear tape, this vides is surrounded in mystery.
the video depicts the brutal execution of a russian serviceman by chechen rebels.
According to the russian authorities the murder took place in 1996 during the first-chechen war.
allegedly, the victim was 33 year old Yuri Vitaleevich Sitrakov (born 1963) who began military service on june 10, 1994 and went missing in Grozny on Okt 8, 1996 (14 days prior to the alleged execution).
he took part in hostilities in the territory of Chechnya, that status of Yuri's whereabouts remained unclear for several years.
however, on the year 2000 after russian servicemen destroyed a rebel militant camp in the Vedina district of Chechnya.
they found a videotape which was then sent to russian authorities for investigation.
a closer look upon the investigation, victim was identified as Yuri Sitrakov, the same guy who had been declared missing four years prior,
it's widely believed chechen field commander Saladin Temirbulatov was responsible for the execution.
despite the victim in the video being identified as a Yuri Sitrakov by Russian authorities, his wife Tatiana refutes this claim.
in the years that Yuri was declared missing, his wife would often visit a special Iaboratory in Rostov.
where unidentified bodies were stored, many of which being soldiers from the first chechen war.
however, tatiana in the search for closure and after investigating numerous bodies, she couldn’t identify her husband for years. she hoped that her husband could still be alive,
However, one day while watching the news on TV, Tatiana's ordeal would reach a whole new level. the news anchor reported that yuri was among several folks who were executed by Chechen rebels.
the news was devastating to her and her young children,
she resigned to the fact that she would never see Yuri again and her children would grow up without a father.

Yuri's execution was also shown russian tv, however, she didn't see it.
though a couple of months later, Russian special services invited Tatiana to view the video and the upon watching the video, the she said that the man not being Yuri.
She brought photos of Yuri was not the man is not Yuri as his ears and cheekbones were different and the spread of his eyebrows were not same.

the special service retorted her claims. they tried to explain to her that the lighting and angle played a role.
however she matched the watched the video repeatedly and repeatedly said it's not Yuri.

She also asked for the quality of the video to be restored.
However this request was declined.
but ‘Boris Shkolnikov’ who worked for Russian authority promised her that there would be a re-genetic examinations of the corpse found at the execution site.
however, it's unclear whether this re-examination ever took place but regardless,

Despite Tatiana's denial i think we can assume that Yuri is Dead.