First Verdicts Handed Down in the Case of a Double Murder from the Viral 2007 Neo-Nazi Video

Neo-Nazis Sergei Marshakov and Maxim Aristarkhov received long prison terms for a double murder committed in the early 2000s.

In October 2020 in Moscow, a criminal case was initiated on a group murder of two people motivated by national hatred (paragraphs "a", "g", "l" of Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code).

The proceedings were initiated on the famous 2007 murder of two, which came to light after the video titled Execution of a Tajik and a Dag was posted online. The video showed Shamil Udamanov, a native of Dagestan, and a native of Central Asia whose identity has not yet been established, brutally murdered beneath a swastika flag. Udamanov was decapitated and the other victim was shot in the head at point-blank range by the far-right. Initially, the investigation had stated that the video was staged, but Udamanov’s father identified the victim in the video as his son.

There was no news about the investigation until September 2020. After the leader of the ultra-right Restrukt movement Maxim (Tesak) Martsinkevich died in custody, there were reports of Tesak’s involvement in this murder. It was reported that he had confessed.

In October 2020, it turned out that the far-right activist Sergei Marshakov and the ex-member of the outlawed neo-Nazi group Format-18 Maxim Aristarkhov, who are both already serving sentences for other crimes, were also charged in this case.

Sergei Marshakov is a veteran of the far-right movement. Since the end of 1999, he has been a member of the Skin Legion group, headed by Maxim Bazylev (Adolf). The activity of the group and Marshakov himself served as material for the book Skins. Rus is Awakening, which was a cult text for Russian Nazi skinheads. In September 2009, during the search of Marshakov’s apartment, he shot and seriously wounded FSB officer Ilya Kostelev and was detained. On February 9, 2011, the Moscow City Court sentenced Marshakov to 16 years in prison. In September 2020, Marshakov stabbed an employee of the Krasnoyarsk pre-trial detention center with office scissors, leading to another criminal case being opened against him.

Maxim Aristarkhov stood at the very origins of Format-18 and took part in the shooting of many videos published by the group. Around 2011, he was convicted of robbery after robbing a taxi driver of a "non-Slavic appearance."

In December 2020, as part of the investigation into the case of the Execution of a Tajik and a Dag, six more ultra-right members suspected of complicity in this murder and in a number of other neo-Nazi crimes of the early 2000s were detained.

On July 23 and 24, 2022, the Mytishchi City Court of the Moscow Region sentenced Sergei Marshakov and Maxim Aristarkhov to 17 and 16 years in prison respectively.