Criminal injustice

The war in Ukraine is offering murderers get-out-of-jail-free cards while the families of their victims live in perpetual fear

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, convicted criminals in Russia have been offered an efficient system of securing their early release from prison: sign a contract with the Defence Ministry, go to fight in Ukraine, get a presidential pardon.

Not content with freeing convicted violent criminals, rapists and murderers, the state even lauds the convicts-turned-soldiers as heroes and defenders of the motherland, while the families of their victims are ignored and expected simply to accept that their criminal records have been wiped clean.

Anna

For the last six months, many residents of Vladivostok in the Russian Far East have been living in fear — ever since Georgy Povilayko returned from the front line. Several years ago, he brutally raped and murdered a 35-year-old mother of two named Anna Koshulko.

Povilayko was convicted of murder and sentenced to 24 years behind bars, but, like many other convicts in today’s Russia, was only made to serve 18 months before regaining his freedom. For three months, he fought in the Russian military where he was wounded, after which he returned to Vladivostok, where he became the topic of online discussion any time locals recognised him in the street.

While Povilayko is currently back fighting in Ukraine, he may return to Vladivostok at any moment as there’s no ironclad rule determining how much time convicts must serve in the army.

Koshulko’s family are mortified that her murderer not only got back his freedom, but that he will soon return to their city a “war hero”.

“Naturally, people are panicking. A convicted murderer roaming around freely?”, widower Alexander Koshulko says. “When the news turned out to be true, it seemed like the whole city was in shock, not just me.”

Koshulko’s friend and colleague Viktoria began fearing for her and her children’s safety upon hearing the news of Povilayko’s return, a fear made all the harder to overcome given that the spot where Povilayko tortured Koshulko before killing her is visible from the balcony of Viktoria’s apartment and serves as a constant reminder of the horror.

“I only hope that she was already dead at that point. She didn’t even have any skin on her knees. She was all cut up.”

Koshulko was a sales rep at the company where her husband worked as a driver. One August morning in 2021, she got ready for work and at around 7am went down to the garage to take her blue Hyundai Creta — a present from her husband — on her usualdn’t just kill her. He attacked her with a knife, stabbing and raping, raping and stabbing. He didn’t simply strangle her. Her skin was blue from all the bruising, and she was covered in blood,” Alexander told Novaya Gazeta last December.

After butchering his victim, Povilayko drove off in her car. He was arrested later the same day.

Alexander says the postmortem concluded that Povilayko had raped Anna both before and after her death.

“I only hope that she was already dead at that point. She didn’t even have any skin on her knees. She was all cut up,” Viktoria says.

“I’m now afraid of going out in the evenings. I also have a son, he’s 13 years old. I worry about him all the time and always ask him to call me when he’s walking home,” says Anastasia, another friend of Anna.

In April 2022, Povilayko was found guilty of rape, murder, car theft, and violence against a police officer and was sentenced to 24 years in prison. However, just 18 months later, he was released from prison after signing a contract with the Russian Defence Ministry. Soon afterwards, he was back in Vladivostok.

“A brutal murderer is now a millionaire.”

The contract likely led to a considerable improvement in Povilayko’s finances, if one is to believe the state’s regular reports on the plethora of allowances and subsidies allotted to newly minted vets.

None of this money, however, will be used as compensation for Anna’s family, unless Povilayko himself decides to turn charitable — Russian law prohibits the expropriation of assets belonging to veterans of the “special operation”.

“After he was wounded and returned to the city, he literally became a millionaire,” Anastasia explains. “A brutal murderer is now a millionaire.”

Tatyana

Tatyana Melekhina from the city of Perm was 27 years old when Dmitry Zelensky strangled her after a fight, put her remains through a meat grinder, and threw her bones into the river.

Zelensky, a veteran of the Second Chechen war, was sentenced to 11 years in prison but served less than four, after signing a contract with the mercenary Wagner Group, spending a few months on the front, and getting pardoned by Vladimir Putin.

According to media reports, Zelensky now lives either in the southern Russian city of Anapa or in the occupied Luhansk region of Ukraine. Melekhina’s family still finds it hard to accept that her murderer is free.

Six years have passed since Tatyana’s murder. Her father, Nikolay, still cannot bring himself to change anything in his daughter’s room. Everything is as she left it — scattered makeup, boxes with jewellery, perfume bottles. The only change is that now the room is also filled with pictures of her.

“It’s still very hard for Dad,” says Oksana, Tatyana’s older sister. “He has started drinking a lot. He gets back from work and drowns his sorrow in alcohol because, at home, everything reminds him of her.”

Melekhina and Zelensky met in Perm. She was an accountant working towards her second degree, while he was working at a chemical plant.

In 2018, Zelensky invited Melekhina to move into his flat in Gubakha, a small town 200 kilometres from Perm. She accepted and moved on 20 June 2018. A month later he killed her.

“We couldn’t even bury her whole body.”

Zelensky would later tell the police that the reason they fought was that Melekhina didn’t like a former classmate of his the two had met on the street, having been drinking earlier in the day.

Her family rejects that version out of hand, however, saying that there was no classmate involved and that Zelensky was simply angry because she wanted to move out. During their altercation, he grabbed her around the neck from behind and strangled her. A few hours earlier, Melekhina had called her father to say she’d be back in Perm the next day.

After the murder, Zelensky drank some vodka and went to bed. The next day he drove to Perm to get caught on security cameras and provide himself with an alibi, pretending he’d taken Melekhina back to Perm as she had wanted.

The investigation would later reveal that Zelensky dismembered her body and put it through a meat grinder. He flushed the shredded body parts and blood down the toilet and boiled the bones in a large pot.

“How can a murderer be released? How can they say that he has atoned for his guilt?”

After his arrest, Zelensky told the police that he put the bones into three grocery bags and threw them into the river. Some of them have still not been recovered.

“The search for the third bag lasted a very long time,” Oksana recalls. “The riverbed is rocky and there’s a strong current. It carried the bag far away. Some of the bones were scattered right on the riverbank, battered by stones and chewed by animals. So we couldn’t even bury her whole body.”

The family was unable to believe the scale of the injustice when they learned that Zelensky had been pardoned and released after fighting in Ukraine for several months. How could the state free and pardon a sadistic murderer?

The family wrote complaints to different authorities but always got the same answer: Zelensky’s release and pardon were completely legal.

“How can a murderer be released?” Oksana asks indignantly. “How can they say that he has atoned for his guilt? I don’t understand it. It just doesn’t make sense to any normal person.”

Beyond state interests

In late March, Vladimir Putin signed a law exempting veterans of the war in Ukraine from criminal liability for most crimes, including the murder and rape of adults.

Since the full-scale war began, at least 1,130 Russian veterans have been charged with offences ranging from traffic violations to murder. Novaya Europe has learned that in about two thirds of the cases that came to trial, the court considered the defendant’s service in the war a mitigating factor.

“In exercising violence against any dissenting voice, the state reproduces the pattern of domestic violence.”

“Violence and oppression have become the key mechanisms of the Russian state,” Anna Rivina, founder of Nasiliu.net, a leading Russian NGO that provides support to women suffering from domestic violence, told Novaya Europe. “In exercising violence against any dissenting voice, the state reproduces the pattern of domestic violence.”

“Every week, we see something horrible in the news. A 12-year-old girl was murdered and thrown into a well by a man who had returned from the front lines. More recently, a man who had been in prison for murder returned from the war and stabbed his friend to death for hitting on a woman — or so he thought. We see such news stories several times a week now,” Rivina says.

In some cases the violence can be attributed to PTSD, but Rivina does not think that this excuse should automatically apply to all soldiers returning from the battlefield in Ukraine.

“PTSD is something that has to be diagnosed by a psychiatrist. Not every crazy bastard who enjoys violence is suffering from PTSD,” Rivina explains, adding: “I think the most important factor in the use of violence is the authority that allows it. … To curb the spread of violence, it needs to be punished.”

“The Russian state couldn’t care less about what happens to all these people when they come back.”

At the start of the war, many were shocked by the scale of the war crimes committed by Russian soldiers in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. Experts on the topic of violence in Russia, however, were far from surprised.

“For years, we witnessed what Russian policemen, security officers, and military men did to their wives and families and how they were never held accountable for it. At war, they’re not just allowed to perpetuate that violence, but they are praised for it and decorated as heroes,” Rivina notes.

Nowadays, Russia has virtually no psych rehab programmes for its soldiers. “The Russian state couldn’t care less about what happens to all these people when they come back. All it needs is results on the battlefield. The fighters’ psychological state, social standing, or the fate of their children — all this is beyond the interests of the state,” Rivina concludes.