A Russian prisoner who had been let free to fight in Ukraine is charged with killing two people when he returns home.
Demyan Kevorkyan, who has been detained since 2016, is accused of killing a young man and woman on their way home from work. Kevorkyan has been incarcerated for 18 years.
He denies the allegations made against him.
Kevorkyan is one of thousands of detainees selected from Russian prisons to fight in Ukraine with the Wagner mercenary group.
Despite suffering severe casualties, a handful of convicts have since fulfilled their contracts and have returned to Russia as free men. Recruits are promised freedom if they can survive six months on the front lines.
On August 31, 2022, Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly paid a visit to Kevorkyan’s prison before recruiting him and about 150 other detainees.
The ex-convict was reportedly recently seen in his birthplace of Pridorozhnaya in the Krasnodar area of southwest Russia after returning from the Ukrainian battlefields, according to a former detainee.
Tatyana Mostyko, 19, who works as a children’s entertainment in the region, is one of his claimed victims.
According to her mother Nadezhda, “She loved that work.” She would chuckle about what they had been doing and how she had made them laugh when she returned from a job.
On April 28, after finishing a work, Tatyana and her boss Kirill Chubko were returning home when their car developed a punctured tyre.
Darya, Kirill’s wife, informed the local media that he had called her during this period to let her know about the holdup and that some young men had politely offered to help.
Both of them were ultimately killed by the three-person squad led by Kevorkyan.
The other two suspects, Anatoly Dvoynikov and Aram Tatosyan, allegedly led detectives to temporary graves in a neighbouring wooded area near the location of Kirill’s burned-out automobile.
The victims, Kirill and Tatyana, had both been fatally stabbed, and according to law enforcement, the girl had died violently.
The worst part was when I turned my phone back on after we arrived. There were countless messages,” Nadezhda claims.
You have no idea how terrified I was. They could only mean one thing, and that was that it was all over, so I threw the phone into the air. It was a dread of animals. I struggle to explain it.
Kevorkyan was initially incarcerated for his participation in a carjacking gang that had taken possession of a vehicle close to the scene of the subsequent murders. The inhabitants had been robbed by the gang, who also shot and killed one person in the process.
“What legal justification was there for his release?” The broadcaster was told by Nadezhda. According to Russian legislation, prisoners must complete at least two-thirds of their sentences.He ought to have served a minimum of 12 years. He only served six.
President Vladimir Putin acknowledged for the first time in June 2023 that he had pardoned inmates who had returned from fighting in the Ukraine conflict.
According to Prigozhin, the reoffending rate among ex-Wagner recruits is 10% to 20% lower than the national average for criminals who have been released from prison.
However, Olga Romanova, the director of the prisoner rights group Russia Behind Bars, asserts that the actual figure may be far higher because many crimes go unreported because of a rule that forbids criticism of the Kremlin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.