“Most crimes are domestic in nature and occur as a result of alcohol consumption,” the website wrote, noting that ex-prisoners kill more often than other soldiers and also commit crimes against women more often.
According to the website, the victims of these crimes were residents from 80 regions of the Russian Federation as well as unrecognized South Ossetia, which is part of Georgia under international law. “In addition to more than fifty previously known crimes of war participants related to the death of civilians from the media, more than 350 criminal cases were found on the court websites,” Vjorstka comments on his analysis.
According to its statement, the website included in the summary only those cases where it was actually possible to confirm the previous participation of the perpetrator in the war in Ukraine. Among the perpetrators of the aforementioned crimes, the server found 246 pardoned or paroled prisoners and 180 other soldiers.
Of the 125 pardoned and paroled participants in the war who murdered or caused fatal injuries in Russia, 54 were previously convicted of similar crimes, the server pointed out.
Modified judgments
It was also confirmed that Russian courts judge returnees from the fighting more leniently. Of the 292 published judgments analyzed by journalists, the courts did not consider their earlier participation in the war in Ukraine as a mitigating circumstance for only 15 percent of the perpetrators, the website added.
“Of course, there are more of these crimes than Vjorstka managed to find out. “Civil courts do not publish all decisions on the cases they have reviewed, and in their decisions they also often do not include information about presidential pardons of former prisoners or the participation of the accused in the Special Military Operation,” the website adds, noting that in some cases judgments against participants in the war in Ukraine are published. additionally modified.
Murders in the Siberian village of Kutana. Image published by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation
After arriving from Ukraine, some returnees from the war murdered several people at once. For example, a former member of Wagner’s mercenary group, Igor Safonov, together with his partner, left six people, including one woman, stabbed in the remote village of Derevjanoje in Karelia last year.
From the point of view of Vjorstka’s report, for example, the story of ex-convict Viktor Savinov, who this year after returning from fighting in the Siberian village of Kutana, first drunkenly killed his friend with a crowbar and later killed an older relative with an ax, who in the past won the title “Best Teacher of Russia”.
