Who is to blame for the murder of three residents of Chechnya
Escape for the line of justice. Military personnel are not often put on the federal wanted list. On January 14, the name of Senior Lieutenant of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Yevgeny Khudyakov appeared in this sheet.
On December 27, 2007, the North Caucasus District Military Court on charges of killing three residents of Chechnya sentenced Yevgeny Khudyakov and Lieutenant Sergei Arakcheev to 17 and 15 years in prison, respectively. But only Arakcheev was taken into custody - Khudyakov did not appear for the announcement of the verdict (both officers were under house arrest).
Absolutely according to the same scenario and in the same military court, a high-profile trial already over army commandos finished. On June 14, 2007, Captain Eduard Ulman, Lieutenant Alexander Kalagansky, Warrant Officer Vladimir Voevodin and Major Aleksey Perelevsky were sentenced to 14, 11, 12 and 9 years in prison. They were accused of killing six civilians in Chechnya. But Ulman, Kalagansky and Voevodin disappeared - they were also under house arrest. I had to put them on the federal wanted list. 1 However, the prosecution was satisfied with the very fact of the verdict: the scandalous cases were closed. They became scandalous because they exposed a gap in domestic law: the army and internal troops are de facto fighting in their own country, but legally there is no war, no internal conflict, no state of emergency, at best - only the regime of the counter-terrorist operation (CTO) . 2 Since there is no military conflict, well-known lawyer Stanislav Markelov tells The New Times correspondent 3 , huge problems arise: in fact, rights and freedoms are limited in the region, but legally everything is fine, there are no war crimes, the usual articles of the Criminal Code are applied. But the army does not fight according to the Constitution - according to combat regulations and closed instructions. And one more thing: there is no mechanism for non-execution of a criminal order.
Roadside check
Lieutenant of the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Sergey Arakcheev, Khudyakov's accomplice, did not run away from the verdict. But is he guilty?
Arakcheev and Khudyakov served in the Separate Special Purpose Division (ODON) of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (the former division named after Dzerzhinsky): the first commanded an engineer company, the second - a reconnaissance company. According to the prosecution, on January 15, 2003, servicemen stopped a Volga near Grozny's Severny airport, forcing its driver to get into an armored personnel carrier, then a KamAZ. Then the truck driver and two of his passengers were killed, and the driver of the Volga was taken to the location of the unit, tortured, but then released alive. "KamAZ" was blown up and burned. However, the problem is that there are more than enough failures and inconsistencies in the evidence base. The evidence against the accused is only indirect, there are no witnesses to the crime, there is no evidence that Arakcheev was at all that day with Khudyakov. The prosecution argued that the commander of the engineer company Arakcheev was attached to the crew of Khudyakov's armored personnel carrier as a simple sapper. It is already doubtful: why was the company commander suddenly sent as a simple sapper? Not only that: there is no order for secondment. The Volga driver recognized the officers in court... by their eyebrows: he did not see the faces of the people who had captured him, they were all wearing masks. The ballistic examination de facto failed: the type and caliber of the weapon from which the people were killed has not been reliably established. No bullets were found in the bodies, and cartridge cases found at the scene, according to official expertise, do not match the weapons of the accused.
There is one of two things: either the investigation got into a puddle, hastily blinding the case, or the defendants have nothing to do with the crime. It turns out that in 5 years a serious crime has not been solved? Serious people were in charge of the investigation: Oleg Ustinov, then military prosecutor of the North Caucasus Military District, the elder brother of Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, and Deputy Prosecutor General for the Southern Federal District Sergei Fridinsky, current Chief Military Prosecutor.
View from 2003
Why such attention to the matter? Here it is important to look through the prism of what was happening in those days in Chechnya. The Kadyrov administration was then at odds with the military, blaming them for lawlessness, and the prosecutor's office for inaction. The nervousness of the warriors was also high: the high-explosive war was growing, the dust had not yet settled after the Nord-Ost, and then on December 27, 2002, suicide bombers in a car with explosives attacked a complex of government buildings in Grozny. 4 Any car was then perceived by the federal military as a potential combat target, incidents with shelling of vehicles became more frequent: the military first shot, then found out who. And on the nose was the referendum scheduled for March 23, 2003 in Chechnya. At the beginning of 2003, the author of these lines was just on a business trip in Chechnya and remembers how the prosecutor's office complained: the warriors can be understood, their nerves are at the limit, but they are completely presumptuous. Lawyer Stanislav Markelov agrees that in a number of cases, departmental motives could play a role: “Relations between prosecutors and the military and the forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs became tense, they literally gnashed their teeth from impotence.” Markelov described how the riot police rescued their colleague Sergei Lapin, who was accused of murder, from the court: 5 blocked the quarter, drove armored personnel carriers to the courthouse, machine guns through the windows, broke in, broke furniture, played football with folders with documents ...
It would have been necessary to put the warrior in his place anyway, and the best way is to realize the case, that is, to bring the prosecution to court. And it's not hard to find shooters. Guilty or not, Arakcheev and Khudyakov, but it was their part that fell under the distribution. Maybe because she was closer to the crime scene? And military prosecutors were frequent in the unit then: almost forty prosecutor's inspections per month is no joke.
Execution Order
The Ulman case is the other side of the war. Here, all the evidence is available, and the officer himself and his subordinates did not deny the murder. Ulman's group was abandoned in the vicinity of the village of Dai in the Shatoi region on January 11, 2002. The task, according to the prosecution, is to block the Dai-Qingdoy road and inspect the transport. In reality, the task of the GRU special forces group was different: an ambush. Why such subtleties? Surveillance and ambush are different things. An ambush, according to the classic definition of the TSB, is “an advance and carefully disguised location of a military unit ... on the most probable enemy movement routes in order to defeat it with a surprise strike, capture prisoners and destroy military equipment.” The commandos were waiting for Khattab: he, according to intelligence, was in the village. According to the plan of the operation, the troops blocked and cleared the village, and the special groups sat on the possible escape routes of the militants. But Ulman was ambushed by an UAZ with six villagers, and not with militants, one was killed. What the captain reported to the headquarters of the special operation, having received an order by radio: to destroy everyone. The captain asked several times, but the order was carried out. Everything was revealed the next day. They did not cover Ulman, because for the command of the 291st Guards Regiment, whose forces were mainly involved, the special forces were aliens, temporarily seconded from Khankala. But it didn’t work out to put all the blame on the captain: at the confrontation, the radio operators confirmed that Major Perelevsky had given such an order. And already the major began to refer to instructions from above, but then the thread was cut off.
Lawyer of the injured party Lyudmila Tikhomirova 6 in an interview with The New Times correspondent, she said: “I don’t see any legal problem here, Ulman understood that it was unacceptable to shoot even prisoners of war, and there were civilians at all. He knew that the order was illegal, but he carried it out.”
legal ambush
The representative of the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office (GVP), Dmitriev, briefly commented on the legal conflicts to The New Times correspondent: “The position of the Main Military Prosecutor's Office completely coincides with the position of the prosecution at the trials. I have nothing more to add."
That is, fighting or not, but everything is decided within the framework of the current Criminal Code. But what about the mechanism for non-execution of a criminal order, as defined in Article 42 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation? No answer. “And this is the main problem: a departmental act for military personnel is more important than the Criminal Code,” says Stanislav Markelov. In other words: no matter what is written in the Criminal Code about the right not to execute a knowingly criminal order, soldiers and officers are guided primarily by the charter, which unequivocally states that “failure to comply with an order is a military crime”, which falls under Article 332 of the Criminal Code and is punishable by imprisonment for up to 5 years. It is not necessary to count on the fact that a soldier in a war will be guided by moral standards. The relevant regulatory authorities should monitor and punish the issuance of criminal orders. But they were not de facto in Chechnya. There was only one law - the law of the forest: either you kill or you will be killed. Which, however, does not in the least justify those who shot civilians, "cleansed" the elderly and children.
Alexander Cherkasov, a member of the board of the Memorial Society, is sure that the main problem is the legal vacuum created in the region: “There is an armed conflict in which the controlling structures simply could not work. And the servicemen were not instructed what was legal and what was criminal.” And after all, there is a suitable legislative norm: the law on the state of emergency. But this, says Cherkasov, means a clear regulation: what can be done, what cannot be done, restrictions on terms and territory ... “It's not only restrictions, but also the introduction of clear rights and, most importantly, responsibility. If the state of emergency - the state is obliged to report to the Council of Europe. And why tie your hands, bear responsibility? According to Cherkasov, the legal vacuum was created in Chechnya quite deliberately, since it allowed him to do everything and not be responsible for anything. This gave rise to a system of organized impunity and fabrication of cases - when you need to find a scapegoat.
Charter of the internal service of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Paragraph 30: "Discussion of the order is unacceptable, and disobedience or other non-execution of the order is a military crime." Paragraph 31: "The subordinate is obliged to unquestioningly carry out the orders of the superior." Paragraph 37: "The order (order) must comply with the requirements of the laws."
Criminal Code of the Russian Federation Article 42. Execution of an order or order 1. It is not a crime to cause harm ... by a person acting in pursuance of an order or order binding on him. Criminal liability is borne ... by a person who gave an illegal order or instruction. 2. A person who has committed an intentional crime in pursuance of a knowingly illegal order or instruction shall bear criminal liability on a general basis. Failure to execute a knowingly illegal order or instruction excludes criminal liability.
____________________________ 1 In both cases, the jury twice (!) acquitted the defendants, which were protested by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office. On April 6, 2006, the decision of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation No. 3-P was issued: “The consideration by the North Caucasus District Military Court of all cases of especially grave crimes against life ... must be carried out without the participation of jurors”
2 According to Article 21 of the Federal Law “On Combating Terrorism”, CTO participants are released from liability for harm caused during its implementation.
3 President of the Rule of Law Institute, participated in a number of trials on crimes committed in Chechnya.
4 The victims of the attack were 72 people, about 200 were injured.
5 The same officer from the Khanty-Mansiysk OMON, nicknamed Cadet, who threatened Anna Politkovskaya.
6 Lyudmila Tikhomirova, as a lawyer for the injured party, participated in both the Ulman case and the Arakcheev-Khudyakov case.
Escape beyond the line of justice • New Times • RIMA — Russian Independent Media Archive
