‘Penza Network Case’ prisoner Maxim Ivankin charged with murder, claims he confessed under torture

Maxim Ivankin, a prisoner in the “Network” terrorism case, has been charged in connection with the 2017 murders of Ekaterina Levchenko and Artyom Dorofeyev, Novaya Gazeta reported on Tuesday, October 5.

Three weeks ago, on September 5, Ivankin was transferred from a prison in Russia’s Chuvash Republic. Ivankin’s parents weren’t informed of his whereabouts, but they surmised that prison officials were trying to intimidate him in order to extract a confession.

Lawyers finally discovered Ivankin’s whereabouts when they were allowed to question him at a pretrial detention center (SIZO-1) in Ryazan on October 4–5. Novaya Gazeta published excerpts from the questioning in its report.

According to the excerpts, Ivankin said that he was initially taken to a prison hospital on the grounds of the Vladimir Region’s Penal Colony No.3 (IK-3). There, under torture, he was forced to write a confession and sign a waiver relinquishing his right to a lawyer, Ivankin said.

Ivankin also claimed that he was ordered to make sure that the events described in his confession correspond with the findings from an investigation published by Meduza in February 2020. Lawyer Konstain Kartashov told Novaya Gazeta that Ivankin later retracted his confession.

The authorities charged Ivankin with premeditated murder by prior conspiracy (under Russian Criminal Code Article 105, section 2), which is punishable by up to life in prison.

• Maxim Ivankin is currently serving a 13-year prison sentence handed down to him in February 2020 as part of the “Network” terrorism case.
• Also in February 2020, Alexey Poltavets — an acquaintance of the Network case suspects in Penza, who fled Russia — told Meduza that he and Maxim Ivankin murdered their friends, Ekaterina Levchenko and Artyom Dorofeyev, in 2017. In early March 2020, Levchenko’s remains were recovered outside Ryazan, not far from where Dorofeyev’s body had been discovered earlier. Their murder cases were subsequently merged and transferred to federal investigators. Maxim Ivankin is the first defendant to be charged in the murder case.