Two Kaliningrad doctors sentenced to huge prison terms, found guilty of killing newborn baby

A court in Moscow has sentenced Yelena Belaya, a head physician from Kaliningrad, to 9 years and 6 months in prison, while her subordinate Elina Sushkevich was sentenced to 9 years. Both were accused of killing a newborn child, TASS reports.

The jury found the two women guilty of killing a newborn child in a maternity hospital. The prosecutor requested 13 years in prison for both.

This was the second trial in the case. The first one ended up in the jury acquitting the women on all charges in 2020, however, the non-guilty verdict was cancelled by Moscow’s court of appeals, and the two were sent into a pre-trial detention centre again last October.

A criminal procedure against Yelena Belaya who used to work as an interim head physician at one of Kaliningrad’s maternity hospitals and Elina Sushkevich, a neonatologist, was initiated in 2018. The prosecutor’s theory is that Sushkevich, following an order from Belaya, injected a lethal dose of magnesium sulphate into the body of a premature newborn child.

Russia’s doctors supported the women. For instance, Russia’s Neonatologist Society stated that the charges were “absurd in nature” and “not supported by any scientific evidence.” Leonid Roshal, a major paediatrician and an expert for the WHO, even tried bringing Vladimir Putin’s notice to the case.