Court arrests Kaliningrad doctors accused again of killing premature baby

The Moscow Regional Court has remanded in custody Kaliningrad doctors Elina Sushkevich and Elena Belaya, who are again accused of the death of a newborn child.

More about the case

The Investigative Committee opened a case against the acting head physician of Kaliningrad Maternity Hospital No. 4 Elena Belaya and the resuscitator-anesthesiologist of the Regional Perinatal Center Elina Sushkevich in 2018, after a premature baby boy died in the department. According to investigators, Belaya decided that the child would not survive and decided to kill him so as not to spoil the department's statistics. As the Investigative Committee believed, Sushkevich, on Belaya's instructions, administered a lethal dose of medication to the newborn.

In December 2020, a jury acquitted Belaya and Sushkevich, after which the court acquitted them. Following an appeal by the prosecutor's office in May 2021, the court overturned the acquittal and sent the case for a new trial.

Sushkevich and Belaya were taken into custody in the courtroom. As lawyer Andrei Zolotukhin said, the court noted that the crime they were charged with was particularly serious, and also considered that the accused could abscond or exert pressure on the investigation.

But the most cynical thing, of course, in my opinion, is that it was especially emphasized that both defendants do not live in the Moscow region, and yet the jurisdiction was not changed at their whim.

• The retrial of Bela and Sushkevich is being held in Moscow, not in Kaliningrad, at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office. The agency explained the need to move the trial to another region by possible actions in defense of the doctors, as well as the "potential interest of high-ranking officials" of the Kaliningrad Ministry of Health in their acquittal.
• During the investigation and trial, the medical community repeatedly stood up for Belaya and Sushkevich. Leonid Roshal, head of the Research Institute of Emergency Children's Surgery and Traumatology, compared the case to the persecution of doctors in 1953.