In Astrakhan, a former prisoner who fought in Ukraine received a new sentence for killing the mother of his daughter in the presence of the girl. According to him, the murdered woman insulted Putin and the military

The Sovetsky District Court of Astrakhan sentenced former prisoner Ivan Polunin, who fought in Ukraine, to nine and a half years in a maximum security colony for the murder of the mother of his 13-year-old daughter.

As Dozhd reports, the court’s press service briefly reported on the verdict to the “ SVO participant” back in July. The text of the verdict appeared later—there is no access to the page with the document now due to a malfunction in the websites of Russian courts, Mediazona notes .

According to the case materials, 41-year-old Polunin, who was serving time on a “narcotics” charge, received a pardon in April 2023 and went to fight in the Lugansk region of Ukraine. During the war, he received a shell shock, and at the beginning of 2024 he returned to the village of Sasykoli, Astrakhan region.

Returning from the war, Polunin decided to get closer to his 13-year-old daughter, whom he had not seen since birth, since all these years he had been imprisoned on various charges. The child’s mother, a 48-year-old resident of Astrakhan, spoke out against the girl’s communication with her biological father. She claimed that Polunin threatened her.

Despite the mother’s ban, the former prisoner began to visit his daughter, and in mid-February he took the girl to Sasykoli under the pretext of meeting relatives. As a result, he did not return his daughter home, but took him to a rented apartment in Astrakhan, where the child’s mother soon found them.

There was a quarrel between the girl's parents. During the conflict, Polunin stabbed the woman several times. At this time, the daughter was in the next room. After the murder, Polunin took the child to a hotel, telling her that the mother had “left for America.” At the trial, the girl said that she heard the sounds of blows, screams and wheezing of her mother, and also saw her body on the floor. According to her, she obeyed her father because she was scared. Leaving his daughter at the hotel, Polunin returned to the apartment, dismembered the body of the murdered woman and got rid of its fragments. The next morning he was detained.

At the trial, Polunin said that during the quarrel, his daughter’s mother insulted the participants in the war and Vladimir Putin, said that she had Ukrainian roots and many relatives from Ukraine, and the Russian military was “killing her relatives.” He tried to convince her that the Russian military was “defending their homeland from Western aggression,” and stated that her words provoked him to commit a crime.

Witnesses told the court that after returning from the war, Polunin did not take off his military uniform and talked a lot about “the terrible events in the Northern Military District .” His daughter reported that she heard “dad talking about religion” and that he “killed many” in the war.

The examination found the accused sane. Polunin admitted guilt. The court considered his participation in the war a mitigating circumstance.

• The recruitment of prisoners from Russian colonies to participate in the war in Ukraine has been known since the summer of 2022. In return, they were promised pardons and cash payments. Initially, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC was involved in this, then they began recruiting people for the war in the colonies on behalf of the Russian Ministry of Defense.
• The media regularly report that former prisoners return from war to commit crimes again. According to calculations by the publication “Verstka” at the end of September, almost 500 people were killed or injured as a result of such crimes throughout Russia.