Russian soldiers who have killed or tried to kill more than 1,000 of their own civilians are serving on the front line, an investigation has found.
The investigation by Mediazona, an independent Russian news outlet, found that soldiers implicated in homicide and other serious assaults overwhelmingly returned to combat rather than facing trial or imprisonment.
Military courts limited transparency around such cases after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, refusing to publish records of proceedings, erasing references to defendants’ wartime service and deleting rulings after publication.
Ten case studies scrutinised by Mediazona included that of one soldier who shot a woman at close range with a Kalashnikov assault rifle in Crimea for criticising the war, and that of another who fatally assaulted a pensioner with a tree branch.
In nine of the 10 cases, defendants went back to war instead of serving their sentence for the crimes. On some occasions, relatives of the victims were told that they would not receive compensation because the perpetrator had returned to combat.
Nine out of 10 soldiers implicated in homicide and other serious assaults returned to combat rather than face trial or imprisonment – EPA/Shutterstock
Military courts have received an estimated 1,045 cases of murder and serious bodily harm that led to death since the full-scale invasion, according to Mediazona.
The real number of cases is likely to be higher because of the lack of transparency in military courts and the fact that those who had finished their service at the time of the crime would likely be rerouted to civilian courts rather than the military docket.
Since the early stages of the conflict, the Kremlin has recruited aggressively from penal colonies and court registries, promising convicts lavish pay and the expungement of their criminal records in exchange for signing military contracts.
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The policy has horrified many Russians after a string of high-profile cases in which violent offenders sidestepped punishment by enlisting.
On Dec 8, Russia’s Kommersant newspaper reported that a man from western Siberia, accused of murdering and skinning his wife over an uncooked dinner, had been allowed to fight in Ukraine rather than face prison.
In one notorious case, Azamat Iskaliyev, who had stabbed his spouse to death for seeking a divorce in 2021, was freed and pardoned to fight in Ukraine. When he returned, he killed his ex-girlfriend, stabbing her more than 60 times.
In its own study of crimes committed by military servicemen, Verstka, a Russian independent outlet, estimated that veterans were some 18 times more likely to commit murder than the average person.
Courts also routinely hand down lighter penalties to servicemen than their civilian counterparts. Verstka estimated that, in roughly 90 per cent of cases, courts cited the participation of soldiers in the Ukraine war as a mitigating circumstance for their crimes.
A friend of Anna Kasyanova, a woman who was strangled to death with a scarf and hit on the head eight times with a hammer, told the outlet that she had been informed by police that the perpetrator would get a lighter sentence because he had “washed away the offence with blood” in Ukraine.
It was previously reported that concerns about the prospect of Russia’s million-strong army returning to civilian life had sparked concerns all the way up to Moscow’s top political brass.
Three sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters in September that Vladimir Putin feared a mass return of servicemen could destabilise Russian society, invoking memories of the 1990s organised crime wave that followed the return of soldiers from the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan.
Russian authorities have said no more than 140,000 service members have returned to civilian life so far, a relatively small cohort. However, analysts have speculated that fears of widespread upheaval in the event of full demobilisation are contributing to Putin’s unwillingness to end the war.
