‘What comes next? Amnesty.’

In 2020, Russian police ignored a call that could have stopped a student’s murder. Now the killer appears to have gone from prison to Ukraine.

On January 14, 2020, Vera Pekhteleva, a 23-year-old college student from Kemerovo, was murdered. On the day of her death, she went to pick up her belongings from the home of her ex-boyfriend, Vladislav Kanyus; the couple had broken up two months earlier. But that day, Pekhteleva didn’t leave his apartment alive. According to case materials, she sustained more than 100 injuries. According to her uncle, her first injuries came 12 hours before her eventual death.

Neighbors reported hearing the sound of a woman’s screams coming from the apartment. They tried to get into the apartment themselves, but nobody would open the door; they also called the police at least eight times. Ultimately, however, law enforcement showed up only after Kanyus’s brother, a friend, and the neighbors broke open the door themselves and discovered Pekhteleva’s body. According to Vera Pekhteleva’s mother, Oksana Pekhteleva, Kanyus was sitting on the bathroom floor, drinking vodka.

Initially, a criminal case was opened against Kanyus, and he faced up to 15 years in prison for murder. In the spring of 2021, Pekhteleva’s family managed to get his crime reclassified as “murder with particular cruelty,” which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Additionally, Kanyus was charged with violent false imprisonment and rape under the threat of murder.

In July 2022, the Kemerovo Regional Court found Kanyus guilty of “murder with particular cruelty.” It sentenced Kanyus to 17 years in prison and ordered him to pay Pekhteleva’s parents 500,000 rubles ($5,540) in compensation. His was acquitted of the rape charge, and the false imprisonment charge was dropped because the statute of limitations had expired. In his closing statement, Kanyus reportedly said that he didn’t intend to kill Pekhteleva and insisted that she had “provoked” him.

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Pekhteleva’s family disagreed with the court’s verdict and tried to appeal it. In June 2023, human rights advocate Alyona Popova (one of the first people to publicize the story of Pekhteleva’s murder) reported that Kanyus’s case had recently been scheduled for review, but that, according to Pekhteleva’s family, Kanyus had been released from prison and sent to fight in the war against Ukraine.

Pekhteleva’s mother, Oksana Pekhteleva, said she first noted something was amiss when she saw photographs of Kanyus wearing camouflage and holding weapons on his social media account. After that, the family sent a request to Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, which informed them that on April 28, 2023, Kanyus had been sent from a prison in the Kemerovo region to one in Novosibirsk, and from there he was put “under the control of the Federal Penitentiary Service’s Rostov regional division.” Though the family’s request was filed in late April, the response didn’t come until mid-June.

“In other words, the cassation appeal still hadn’t taken place, and he was sent to war. And what comes next? Amnesty,” Popova said. Kanyus’s current whereabouts are unknown.

Criminal negligence

In the aftermath of Vera Pekhteleva’s murder, in addition to the criminal case against Vladislav Kanyus, a separate case was opened against the Kemerovo police, who failed to respond when Kanyus’s neighbors reported hearing screams. Initially, the defendants in the case were 41-year-old shift supervisor Major Mikhail Balashov and 40-year-old senior duty officer Captain Dmitry Taritsyn. According to investigators, they registered the incident report but did not send a task force to the scene. The officers were charged with criminal negligence, which is punishable by up to five years in prison.

Later, officers Maria Ponomareva, Maria Dunayeva, and Kristina Yudintseva were also charged in the case. Investigators say the women failed to listen to the full recordings of the emergency calls, did not ask the callers the proper questions about the situation, and did not report the information to police task forces and to the Russian National Guard.

The officers’ trial was postponed several times due to the defendants’ purported health problems, though Pekhtelova’s relatives alleged that the authorities deliberately drew out the process and that the court declined to give Kanyus a harsher sentence in order to assist the police.

The prosecution requested prison sentences between 2.5 and 3.5 years for the defendants, while the officers themselves asked the court to acquit them.

On July 10, 2023, a Kemerovo court sentenced all of the officers to probation and ordered them to pay two million rubles ($22,160) to Pekhtelova’s family in compensation. After the sentence was handed down, Pekhtelova’s father, Yevgeny Pekhtelov, said that justice had “halfway prevailed,” though he said the defendants should have been given prison terms. “They [the police] are smiling right now, they’re satisfied,” he said.

On July 10, Alyona Popova shared a statement from Vera Pekhtelova’s mother:

We weren’t holding out hope for prison sentences [for the police officers]. In the three and a half years that we’ve been fighting for justice in our case, we’ve seen all the skeletons in the closet of our justice system, our law enforcement system, and our penalty enforcement institutions. What is there to say? Our goal at the moment is to find information about the whereabouts of Vera’s murderer.

According to Popova, Vera Pekhtelova’s uncle told her that Kanyus is in an online group for people seeking to emigrate to the U.S. “That’s just the cherry on top of this cake from hell,” Popova said.