Russia is searching for a convicted serial rapist and murderer who signed up to fight in Ukraine — and then escaped. Officials concealed it for months.
Warning: This article contains descriptions of violence.
Russian authorities are searching for Andrei Kiyko, 41, a convicted serial rapist and murderer known as the “Sosnovsky Maniac,” in the town of Ropsha in the Leningrad region. Defense Ministry units and police are participating in the operation. Residents of Ropsha reported seeing a man in civilian clothes showing passersby a wanted notice bearing Kiyko’s photograph, according to the St. Petersburg-based news outlet 47news and Fontanka.
In the 2000s, Kiyko carried out a series of attacks on women in Sosnovsky Park in St. Petersburg. He typically approached victims from behind, grabbed them by the neck, and pressed a knife to them. Media reports noted that from a distance the attacker and his victim could appear to be a couple strolling arm in arm. Kiyko raped and robbed women, passing their belongings to acquaintances and his mother. He killed some of his victims.
In 2008, a court convicted Kiyko of two murders, eight counts of sexual assault, and 11 counts of armed robbery, sentencing him to 22 years in prison. In 2023, the sentence was extended to 25 years after he was convicted of an additional murder.
According to 47news, Kiyko signed a contract with the Defense Ministry in mid-2024, when he still had seven years left to serve. In January 2025, he was wounded and hospitalized in Rostov, then transferred to a rehabilitation facility at a hospital in Kronstadt. There he twice filed suit against the Defense Ministry over payments and benefits for combat veterans; both efforts failed — one claim was returned, the other ignored.
The exact date of Kiyko’s escape is unknown. Fontanka places it in the summer of 2025; 47news says it was in the early fall of 2025. The search, however, began only recently. 47news reported: “Preliminary information suggests that the Defense Ministry did not announce the search for him until May [2026], and that his escape had been concealed in the meantime, with police being the last to be informed. The Main Directorate of the Interior Ministry was not pleased about that, but it has thrown its criminal investigation units into the search.”
Since 2022, several serial killers and rapists recruited from Russian prisons to fight at the front have been reported killed. In 2023, the “Tulunskiy Maniac” Pavel Shuvalov, who had been sentenced to 24 years, was killed near Luhansk; he is believed to have attacked 27 women, though only two counts of rape and two counts of murder could be proven. In 2025, Yakov Khanukaev, who received 19 years for the rape and murder of three sex workers in Khimki, was reported killed. In early 2026, the death of Yuri Gritsenko, who in the 2000s attacked women with a hammer in a park in Zelenograd, was reported.
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