Photo: SERGEY VENYAVSKY / Getty Images
“It’s like I’m in hell,” confesses Oksana Pechteleva. Vera Pechteleva’s mother, 23, from Kemerovo, brutally murdered by her ex-boyfriend Vladislav Kanyus in January 2020, she is traumatized.
The assailant had inflicted more than a hundred wounds on his daughter. The policemen who took hours to arrive after Vera’s neighbors called the police station were sentenced to suspended sentences. The attacker was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
The family wanted a higher sentence and filed a cassation suit, but it never went to court. It was said that the prisoner could not be located. Later, Vera’s relatives discovered photos on social networks in which Vladislav Kanyus appeared in a military uniform with a weapon. They suspect that he is on the loose and fighting in the Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin met with the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, after the armed rebellion https://t.co/GXK4ZpnYa0
– The Opinion (@Real America NewsLA) July 10, 2023
“It’s a nightmare”
“I feel fear, pain, misunderstanding: it’s a real nightmare,” says Oksana Pechteleva. Russian psychologist Ekaterina Isupova stresses that relatives of victims often suffer from post-traumatic disorders when they grieve for a loved one or when they themselves have suffered threats of physical violence.
“The reaction includes a lot of fear, helplessness and horror. When the offenders go to jail, the victims feel some relief and hope that the horror will end. But when they find out that their attacker has returned and can be among people again, fear arises,” says Isupova.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some 50,000 prisoners have been recruited from jails to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and another 15,000 by the Defense Ministry. This is reported by the director of the “Sitting Russia” foundation, Olga Romanova, in exile in Germany.
“It is probably mostly criminals with sentences of 10 years or more who went to war,” explains a Russian lawyer who did not wish to give her name. “There are no statistics, but those who have already served five or six years behind bars are more likely to be released on parole and are unlikely to risk their lives,” says the expert.
From killer to “hero”
In January, the head of Wagner’s mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin, met with a group of prisoners. They were allowed to return home after six months of service in Ukraine and they were exempted from all their sentences. Among them were two men convicted of murder.
But not all prisoners return alive from the war. In November 2019, Eduard Yar, from the village of Karaul, in the Krasnoyarsk region, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the murder of a woman.
In November 2022, Jar joined the Wagner Group. In February 2023, he was killed near the besieged Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. The authorities of his hometown wrote then in an obituary: “He went out to fight the neo-Nazis and thus became a true hero and a true patriot for all the inhabitants of our region.”
Former prisoners also in the regular army
But expresses are not only found in Russian private armies. From February 1, in Russia prisoners who have not yet served their sentences can also be accepted into the contract service of the Russian regular army.
And, at the end of June, the Russian president signed the law “On the peculiarities of the criminal responsibility of the persons involved in the Special Military Operation”. This is what the war against Ukraine is called in Russia.
The law deals with the recruitment of people who are under suspicion or accused and who are threatened with imprisonment for a maximum of five years.
According to human rights activist Olga Romanova, this is how people facing sentences for light and medium crimes are mobilized for war. “A person is arrested, a criminal case is opened, and then the person agrees to go to war, and then the criminal case is abandoned..
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