The quiet morning of a Sunday in February in the Siberian city of Achinsk was torn by the screams. A womanwith the coat waving, ran through a snowy playground, persecuted by a man, who threw her to the ground and then stabbed her in the neck, According to a video.
Yekaterina Polyanskaya He continued screaming as his life was exhausted and the man, supposedly su ex marido, Kirill Cheplygin, He fled from the place. Moments before, according to the authorities, he had killed his new partner, Vyachelsav Komarenko. Both murders, which occurred on February 9, were recorded by security cameras and disseminated by the local media Part of Achinsk.
Cheplygin was arrested and accused of those crimes, but apparently since then has requested to leave prison to fight Ukraine and thus avoid a prison sentencea usual way for those imprisoned in Russia. To an unusual extent, members of the local community began a petition on Change.org on April 19, expressing their fear that he could return one day, “with the intention of finishing what began”, as many others have done.
Perhaps the most dystopian note of society at the president’s war Vladimir Putin Let them Policies that pardon criminals, including murderers and rapists, if they are going to fight in the war, allowing those who survive return home after.
Russian communities face an increase in crimes, both by veterans who return and criminals who take advantage of war to get rid of jail. But in the new Russia of Putin, the soldiers are the new heroes, and the harsh laws of censorship in times of war leave little room to criticize them.
Ukraine also approved a year ago a law that allows criminals to fight, but those convicted of multiple murders, sexual crimes or violations of national security laws are prohibited.
Since the Russian invasion, at least 754 Russians have died or have been seriously injured as a result of the violence or the illicit acts of the soldiers, according to an investigation of the independent media Vyorstka, which includes 196 murders, although the medium calculates that the real figure is much higher. Seventy -six of the victims were not killed by former prisoners, but by regular soldiers returning from the war.
last year, Russia registered 617,301 violent crimes, According to figures from the Ministry of Interior, the highest figure since 2014, and analysts maintain That the culture of crime and impunity in the Russian army is probably playing a role in increasing crime. In 2023, the figure was 589,000, compared to 437,300 of 2017.
“The Front in Russia has become a hotbed of other forms of crimes, not only murders, not just cruelty. These are crimes committed against soldiers by first -line commanders,” said Ksenia Kirillova, analyst at the European Policies Analysis Center. “The problem here is the total impunity of these people.”
Russian independent media, as well as patriotic military bloggers, frequently report that The controls “put their soldiers to zero”, that is, they kill them, normally sending them to suicidal missions. Other punishments inflicted on soldiers include balls, confinement in cages or holes in the soil and trees ties.
The lack of psychological support for war veterans that suffer posttraumatic stress and the increase in alcohol consumption in Russia after the invasion probably also contribute. The consumption of liquors and wine in 2023 reached the record of 2.3 billion liters, 4% more than the previous 2022 record, according to the Federal Control service of Alcohol and Tobacco Markets.
The request of the Achinsk inhabitants – which carries a chilling image taken from a surveillance video in which Cheplygin is seen with the knife raised after allegedly killing the couple of their ex -wife – has been a rare case of rejection of the locals when they return these people to their communities.
“We, the people of the town, acquaintances and friends of the victims, we will have to distrust their return from the special military operation, looking over the shoulder in the streets and fearing for our relatives,” said the request.
Polyanskaya’s mother, Nadezhda, declared Part of Achinsk that Cheplygin “wants to go to war to avoid punishment, Not to atone for his guilt … that’s why we fear that nothing stops him and gets out of all of us. ”
It was not possible to contact Cheplygin’s lawyer to comment.
For the families of the victims, seeing the murderers in freedom is a trauma that cannot be overcome. Oksana Pekhteleva, whose 23 -year -old daughter, Vera, was killed by her ex -boyfriend, Vladislav Kanyus, often sees photos of him on social networks, published by friends, normally partying, enjoying life.
The murder was brutal. Vera, a student, had gone to his apartment in Kemerovo in January 2020 to collect his belongings two months after they broke. The police did not respond to the repeated calls of the neighbors, who heard her scream and cry for hours while Kanyus raped her, hit, stabbed and tortured, and strangled her with an electric cable, according to judicial records. His body had 111 wounds. Kanyus was convicted of his murder, but turned less than a year of his 17 -year sentence before choosing to war.
The family protested for the decision, sent letters to Putin and met with officials, without success. They were never told that they had sent him to war, nor that Putin had pardoned him in 2023 and demobilized.
“He is a cruel killer. He is a maniac, and yet we have no chance of finding out where he is,” Pekhteleva said in an interview. “What people experience, those who now live in the same communities with the criminals who killed their relatives, is horror, is a nightmare, and are all the circles of hell.”
The most independent Russian media have documented a Waterfall of crimes of this type committed by returned soldiers. In January, a 23 -year -old soldier from Nalchik, in southern Russia, was accused of murder after allegedly attacking an 87 -year -old old woman who found in a park and hit her for more than 20 minutes, killing her, according to the Russian Research Committee.
Nikolai Ogolobyak, convicted of cannibalism and murder in 2010 for the death of four teenagers, chose to fight in the war, was injured and then returned home, according to state media. He soon had problems with the law again, and last August he received a 10 -year sentence in a Yaroslavl court for drug positions. He declared local media that he would request to return to war.
The independent media Astra He also reported on Two recruits in prison of the Wagner Mercenary Unit that were later arrested and accused of violating girls of 7 and 9 years in separate incidents.
In February 2024, another pardoned murderer who fought in the war, Viktor Savvinov, 35, walked through his people in Kutana, at the eastern end of Yakutia, the day of the defender of the homeland complaining that people did not show him enough respect. He got drunk with a friend and broke his head with a lever. He then killed Valentina Fedorova, 64, awarded the Best Teacher of Russia. He was convicted of both murders and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Fedorova’s daughter told the local communication Sakha day that his mother was attacked because the previous night he had denounced Savvinov for public drunkenness.
“He had bloody hands because he tried to defend himself. After the beating, he took a tillage ax and hit her in the head. They did not even show us his body, he had mutilated my mother so much,” he cited the medium.
On the court page on the Russian social network Vkontakte, a local asked: “Will it sign a contract in the special military operation again?”
After the Soviet withdrawal of Afghanistan in 1989, Russia also experienced a rebound in crime among veterans who returned. According to the newspaper Kommersantsome 372,000 veterans returning regularly abused alcohol and drugs, already the end of 1989, some 3,700 had been convicted of murder and robbery. The trauma of the war was blamed and the lack of psychological services for those who returned.
In the current war, according to analysts, the often brutal methods of the officers to guarantee discipline and direct the troops have exacerbated the trauma caused by the horrors of the conflict.
Many soldiers in the Russian front feel helpless anger against their controls. Dozens of them have recorded videos in which they describe the incompetence or crimes committed by their officers, such as drug abuse, corruption, theft of soldiers’ salary, extortion, drug trafficking and material theft.
Danil Akhipov, 24, former engineer who flew his hand with a fuze in Granada and fled to France to avoid fighting in Ukraine, declared to The Washington Post that soldiers felt trapped in a system “like a conveyor belt” designed to break their will and humanity. Rights between soldiers were often produced, and drunkenness was endemic.
It served in an assault unit with a high casualty index, in which normally three of a force of 15 soldiers survived an assault operation.
“They were all bad commanders. They did not treat you as people. They didn’t care about human lives. They didn’t care how many died,” “ affirms. The soldiers “hated them. There was a feeling almost violence towards them.”
Many, he said, had changed for war. “They have posttraumatic stress. They become very aggressive and act without limits. ”
Despite this abandonment of many veterans who return, the official media present to the soldiers of the “special military operation” as a new elite, which hinders criticism against them.
“Now the situation is much worse, because Now the State legitimizes these crimes. Yes, it is the official government policy. These people could not be criminals, regardless of what they really did, ”said Kirillova, from the European Policies Analysis Center.
In 2023, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry PeskovHe said that criminals could “atone for their crimes with blood on the battlefield, in the assault brigades, under the bullets, under the projectiles.” But this leaves no legal resource to families.
Oksana Pekhteleva, whose daughter was killed, said that violent criminals should not be sent to war or pardoned, “because if they are free, they feel that there is no punishment for them, and this arbitrariness continues.”
“Current people like us can express their discontent, their fury. They can even organize protest concentrations, but nothing will happen until a decision is made at the highest level,” he said. “We respect the law. We are people respectful of the law. But nobody respects us.”
© 2025, The Washington Post.
