‘I never settled things this way’

Khabarovsk’s ex-governor just got 22 years in prison, but his case was riddled with conflicts of interest

Last week, Sergey Furgal, the former governor of the Khabarovsk region in Russia’s Far East, was sentenced to 22 years in a high-security prison for allegedly commissioning two murders and an unsuccessful murder attempt while doing business roughly two decades ago. Several other defendants were also sentenced to 9.5–17 years in prison, in a case that was marked by a lack of conclusive material evidence and massively compromised by conflicts of interest. Meduza breaks down how prosecutors established Furgal’s “guilt” using a mixture of insinuations about real organized crime in the Khabarovsk region and a web of dubious witnesses.

Strange confessions

Police arrested Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal on July 9, 2020, and immediately charged him with organizing two contract murders and another murder attempt. The authorities soon transferred him to a jail in Moscow. Back in Khabarovsk, thousands of people took to the streets to protest his removal from office. If the governor was to be tried in court, some insisted, it should at very least happen in his home city, in the region where he had built his reputation. But the general feeling was that Furgal should simply be released.

Nevertheless, the trial that began in May 2022 took place in a suburban court outside Moscow. Furgal appeared before the court together with three other defendants: his former employee Andrey Karepov, the alleged murderer Andrey Paley, and Marat Kadyrov (charged with attempted murder).

Much of the evidence against Furgal came from his former business partner, then Khabarovsk Duma deputy Nikolay Mistryukov. Back in the early aughts, Mistryukov collected and resold scrap metal together with Furgal. Later, he co-owned a steelworks plant with Furgal’s then-wife, Larisa Starodubova.

In 2019, Mistryukov was arrested on charges of organizing a series of murders around the far-eastern Amur and Khabarovsk regions, back in 2004 and 2005. At first, Mistryukov denied any guilt, but after the legal team hired by his own family was banished from seeing him at the pre-trial detention center and replaced by another defense attorney, Mistryukov caved and confessed.

The turning point in the investigation coincided with the change of Mistryukov’s defense lawyer. The new attorney, Alexey Ulyanov, claimed that he just happened to be passing by the investigator’s office when Mistryukov was there, and they signed a contract on the spot.

Ulyanov had previously defended former Udmurt Republic Governor Alexey Solovyov, who got a 10-year prison sentence on bribery charges but was released due to health reasons. Solovyov’s daughter Evgenia told Meduza that her father’s defense lawyer pressured him to confess, promising help with necessary medications, and finally succeeded in extracting a confession from his own client.

After Mistryukov confessed (possibly under similar pressure from his own defense lawyer), he signed a proxy that let him sell his share in the Amurstal steelworks to Pavel Balsky, the former business partner of the oligarch and close Putin friend Arkady Rotenberg. An acquaintance of Mistryukov’s told Meduza that the defendant counted on his proceeds from the sale (he got 350 million rubles, or roughly $5.4 million, based on the 2019 conversion rates) as money that would take care of his wife and three underage children. Mistryukov’s cancer diagnosis hastened the sale: he was convinced, says his acquaintance, that “he had five years left at most.”

In this way, the person who benefited directly from Mistryukov’s confession turned out to be “just two handshakes removed” from Vladimir Putin.

Two murders and a botched attempt

The person that Sergey Furgal allegedly tried to have assassinated back in July 2004 was Alexander Smolsky, another scrap-metal dealer from the Khabarovsk region. After the turn of the millennium, Smolsky was collecting scrap metal around Progress, a settlement 600 kilometers (about 370 miles) outside Khabarovsk. Furgal and Mistryukov began working there around the same time. According to prosecutors, the two men didn’t want to compete with Smolsky fairly and instead demanded that he lower his purchase prices. When he refused, they allegedly hired Marat Kadyrov to toss a grenade into Smolsky’s garage. (He wasn’t seriously injured.)

Furgal’s defense team has pointed out that he and Mistryukov stopped doing business in the area shortly after the attack on Smolsky, which contradicts their “motives,” as presented by the prosecution. Smolsky himself sued Furgal for damages at first but later withdrew his complaint and refused to take any further part in the trial.

As for the murders allegedly organized by Furgal, the prosecution presented the following picture:

The first victim, the Khabarovsk entrepreneur Evgeny Zorya owned a whole clutch of miscellaneous businesses: he installed plastic windows, sold retail store equipment, ran a chain of grocery kiosks, and also owned wholesale warehouses. During the trial, Furgal mentioned that Zorya’s Canadian citizenship helped him import food products from abroad.

Furgal, Mistryukov, and Zorya crossed paths when Mistryukov’s company MIF-Khabarovsk purchased an industrial hangar that was part of a manufacturing plant sold at the same time to Zorya. The dispute over the hangar ended up in court. Although Furgal claimed that the property didn’t mean much to the partners’ business, the prosecution insisted that Furgal and Mistryukov could not forgive Zorya and paid a million rubles to have him killed.

On October 29, 2004, Zorya was murdered; shot five times with a handgun and abandoned at the crime scene.

The last murder-related count was connected to the killing of Oleg Bulatov, a former police operative who was shot in January 2005.

In the 1990s, Bulatov worked in a local police department but then went into the scrap-metal business. After an “acute conflict” with one of his partners, he turned to Furgal (on Mistryukov’s recommendation) and started working for him. Soon, he became a key shareholder in one of their companies. In his testimony, Furgal described him as a “very good employee”:

[He] delivered serious dividends in advancing the business. He knew the competition and his own work. Two or three months before the murder, Oleg told me he was being followed around by some cars. As a former law enforcement worker, he would have known this. I said that we needed to hire some extra security, to keep an eye on Bulatov’s car. I also told Mistryukov I was concerned about Oleg. Oleg himself connected all this to [his former business partner] Kryukov.

When Bulatov was shot, Furgal and Mistryukov took it upon themselves to pay a monthly stipend to his teenage daughter and did so until she turned eighteen.

Prosecutors say, however, that Furgal and Mistryukov commissioned Bulatov’s murder to keep the former policeman from discovering their role in Zorya’s death.

A parade of defendants

Marat Kadyrov

According to the prosecution, it was Kadyrov who tried to kill the scrap-metal dealer Alexander Smolsky in the village of Progress, even though Kadyrov himself lived back in Khabarovsk. A witness for the prosecution named Vladimir Pershin (a former detective who previously got convicted for extortion) testified that Kadyrov was a “regular killer” in the Khabarovsk criminal circles, but there’s no further evidence that this could be true.

Kadyrov’s family believes that the entire case against him was fabricated, and that the 50-year-old was framed based on his earlier felony conviction in a case also involving explosives. Kadyrov’s misfortunes started when a crooked realtor conned him into paying for a condo that wasn’t his to sell. After learning that the real estate deed was fictitious, the family’s attorney abandoned the dispute. Kadyrov’s sister remembered her words when testifying in court:

I remember what she said verbatim: “Do what you want, but don’t let anyone into the apartment.” So, we took a piece of playdough [to mimic an explosive device] and, when the bailiffs came, we said that if they tried to come inside, they’d be gone, I’d be gone, and the whole apartment would be gone too. In the end, the family got to keep the apartment, where their child grew up and where they still live themselves.

Kadyrov himself then got probation, requiring him to remain in the area. He could not even leave Khabarovsk’s city limits.

The entirety of the “evidence” against Kadyrov came from a confused report by a single “eyewitness” who allegedly bumped into him on a path, either before or after she heard a blast.

Meanwhile, Kadyrov’s neighbor testified that he could not have been in Progress on the day of the explosion, since that very day he picked up his daughter from daycare, babysitting her until that evening. The two families, the neighbor explained, often helped one another. Yet the court rejected this testimony as an alibi.

Andrey Paley and Andrey Karepov

According to prosecutors, Furgal contracted Andrey Paley (then 21 years old) to kill both Zorya and Furgal’s associate Bulatov.

The evidence against Paley also relies on confused witness testimonies. The sole piece of material evidence from the Bulatov murder scene was an LM cigarette butt tossed by someone who had the same blood type as Paley’s, whose defense attorney objected, fruitlessly, that not only Paley himself but also the victim, Bulatov, had the same blood type. Meanwhile, Paley’s ex-wife testified that the only brand of cigarettes Paley ever smoked was Parliament.

Andrey Karepov, prosecutors claimed, was a “dispatcher” who communicated Furgal’s murder commissions to Kadyrov and Paley. Just as with the previous two defendants, it was witness Vladimir Pershin who contributed the bulk of the testimony. Pershin claimed that Karepov told him about the murders, and that he wanted hush money for his silence.

Among others who testified against Karepov was Furgal’s former business partner Mistryukov. While in pre-trial detention, he lost most of his eyesight and was also diagnosed with cancer. When he agreed to cooperate with the prosecution, he was released from jail and put under house arrest.

Sergey Furgal

The “evidence” against Furgal is practically the same as the confused and inconsistent witness testimonies about Karepov. Once again, it was Pershin and Mistryukov who supplied most of the narrative. When questioned in May 2022, Furgal talked about the time when he started his business and met the key witnesses for the prosecution. Organized crime did have a place in this story, but the way it developed had nothing to do with law and order.

Between 1992 and 1998, Furgal recalled, he worked as a doctor, earning a monthly salary (often paid late) of $30–$45. Unable to support his family, he decided to join a crab-fishing vessel as the ship’s physician. While getting his paperwork ready in Vladivostok, he took a side gig at a scrap-metal collection point. Soon, he was earning more than $1,000 a month managing scrap-metal collection in one of the villages in the Primorsky Krai, and the idea of joining a ship’s crew became irrelevant.

It was then that Furgal met Mistryukov, who invited him to Khabarovsk in 2001, to become a COO in one of his companies in exchange for 30 percent of the profits. Around the same time, Furgal and Mistryukov met Pershin, the former chief of the region’s department for fighting organized crime. Pershin agreed to regulate the company’s relations with gangsters for $1,200 a month. (In his court testimony, Pershin confirmed this.)

Even after conviction, Furgal continues to maintain his innocence. In his closing comments to the court, he wondered, “What’s the point of killing someone? You kill one person, and another takes his place. I never settled things this way.”

Translated by Anna Razumnaya