Piece in the Telegraph about the crime wave now pardoned criminals recruited by Wagner are returning home.
I have to say I would have more sympathy for the russian victims (and their family & friends) of Wagner fighters if I were sure they hadn't been cheering on this scum whilst they were raping, torturing and murdering in Ukraine:
Russians forced to live alongside murderers as Wagner ex-convicts return home
Replenishment of Putin’s forces by recruitment from prisons means criminals are now free, with many suspected of new offences
When Anya Pekareva heard that an 85-year-old woman had been murdered in Vyatskiye Polyany, a small town over 500 miles from Moscow that is home to some of her relatives, she thought it an odd coincidence.
Two days later, her parents told her that the woman was her grandmother, who had been murdered by an ex-convict who returned home to the village after fighting in Ukraine with the notorious Wagner mercenary groupp_.
Ms Peskareva, a 36-year-old nurse from St Petersburg, reacted to the news so strongly that her parents feared she would stage a protest against the war, risking arrest and criminal charges.
“After Grandma’s killing, I just drew the line with friends. I said: ‘Everyone who supports the war is guilty of my Grandma’s murder’,” she told The Telegraph.
The murder of Yulia Buiskikh in March was the first of many carried out by ex-convict fighters returning home to Russia. “It was the first case of its kind. But now I’m tired of reposting news about other cases,” said Ms Pekareva.
Across the country, Russians are now living with convicted murderers and rapists in their midsts – a disastrous consequence of Vladimir Putin’s decision to replenish his forces by recruiting fighters from prisonss_.
Four days before Ms Pekareva’s grandmother was killed, local television ran a six-minute news bulletin saying that a local man, previously sentenced to 14 years for killing another woman, had returned home to the nearby village of Novy Burets and “a quiet life”.
The villagers, mostly elderly women wrapped in shawls and winter coats, packed a local community centre at which the police chief tried to address their concerns.
The young man made his presence known in the village early on, staggering through the streets with “a bottle of beer in one hand, a pitchfork in another” and yelling: “I’m going to kill you all.”
A local farmer said milkmaids were too scared to go to work for pre-dawn shifts.
In a surprisingly candid speech, Vadim Varankin, the local police chief, told the villagers that Ivan Rossomakhin was on leave from the Wagner group, which was then fighting in the bloody siege of Bakhmutt_.
Mr Varankin said the mercenary fighter had promised to leave the village as soon as he was allowed out of detention for smashing up a car.
“I’m not going to put up with him here until May. We have agreed that on Tuesday we put him on the train and that I will never set eyes on him here ever again,” he said.
But instead of boarding the train out on Tuesday, Rossomakhin ended up in the nearby town of Vyatskiye Polyany.
Ms Pekareva remembers her grandmother as a kind and generous woman who never even bothered to lock her front door.
She lived alone, and sometimes offered bed and breakfast to people, often high school pupils, who got stuck in Vyatskiye Polyany during snowstorms. Rossomakhin, her killer, was one of those to whom she provided shelter.
Tens of thousands of Russian convicts first recruited by Wagnerr_ last summer typically signed six-month contracts, meaning thousands of criminals were let loose as of this spring.
When the reports about Buiskikh’s murder first surfaced, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former Wagner bosss_, sought to defend his recruitment drive as he said the pardoned convicts hardly ever commited crimes again.
He condemned Buiskikh’s murder, saying of his former fighter: “It is very bad that he committed a crime.”
Police in Russia do not keep statistics on crimes carried out by former Wagner fighters, but journalists across Russia have been reporting grisly murders almost every week since their contracts began to expire.
Russian fighters who returned from Ukraine are suspected of killing at least 17 people and are accused of at least four rapes this year, according to a tally of openly available sources.
In the most recent case, five men and one woman died in a mass murder in a picturesque village close to the Russian border with Finland last month.
Their suspected killers, two friends and former cellmates in their late 30s who had previous convictions for multiple robberies and drug dealing, had just finished their service in two mercenary groups including Wagner.
There seems to be little in the way of a pattern to the killings perpetrated by Russia’s convict mercenaries, who in some cases have appeared to target people at random.
Kirill Chubko, a 37-year-old event entertainer, and his 19-year-old assistant Tatyana Mostyko were driving back from a party to Ust-Labinsk in Russia’s south at the end of April when they got a flat tyre.
Chubko called his wife to say not to worry and to go to sleep while they waited for a car repair man to show up. Several days later, their bodies were found in a nearby forest.
Police have traced the murder to three men. One of them had been sentenced to 18 years for armed robberies on highways before being recruited by Wagner.
Daria Chubko-Andreyeva, Kirill’s wife, who still keeps a photo of herself and their toddler as a profile picture on social media, told The Telegraph she has been struggling to get any details about the probe from investigators.
Like Buiskikh’s granddaughter, Ms Chubko-Andreyeva is looking to connect with other victims of the Wagner mercenaries on Russian soil.
She has also recently launched an online petition, urging the court to pass a life sentence for her husband’s murderers. “I’m learning how to live again,” she said.
Other Russian families face the prospect of coming face to face with the murderers of their loved ones.
One day in June, Oksana Pekhteleva’s friend texted her a photograph of a man, grinning for the camera, dressed in sand-coloured military fatigues and a helmet. He was Vlad Kanyus, the man who brutally murdered her daughter Vera three years ago.
In the town of Kemerovo, more than 2,000 miles north of Moscow, rumours spread quickly that Kanyus, who was sentenced a year earlier to 17 years in a high-security prison for beating his 23-year-old ex-girlfriend to death, was now a free man.
The prison colony to which he had been sent refused to communicate with his victim’s family, citing confidentiality rules, and Russia’s defence ministry denied he was among their soldiers.
The only proof that he had been allowed out of prison came from a letter from bailiffs, who told the family they gave up on trying to collect court-ordered damages from the defendant due to his “departure to the war zone”.
“Vera’s mother is really worried. She’s terrified. Can you imagine what this man did to her daughter?” said Vladimir Pekhtelev, Vera’s uncle
Mr Pekhtelev, who does not follow the news and had no idea there are other families in similar circumstances in Russia, said the family is devastated that justice in their case did not prevail.
“He was killing her for three hours and now he wants to get off scot free? This is unfair. We just want justice, that’s it,” he said.
The long-term effect of the mass pardons of convicts who fought for Wagner on crime rates in Russia is yet not clear.
The Soviet Union faced a somewhat similar predicament at the end of the Second World War when thousands of convicts were released after fighting the Nazis. The crime wave eventually died down when many of the ex-convicts ended up back in prison.
The same could happen in Russia again, according to Vladimir Kudryavtsev, a criminologist at Florida State University.
“We do not have enough data to know whether they commit those crimes because they have experienced trauma during an armed conflict or whether this is a middle-of-the-road repeat offence that would have happened anyway,” he told The Telegraph.
“But we do know that countries that went through armed conflicts often face a surge in violence.”