‘A minor offense’ A doctor beats a patient to death in Belgorod

On the evening of December 29, 2015, an attack took place at a hospital in Belgorod that would soon prompt comments like, “Such a thing could only happen in Russia.” The attacker was surgeon Ilya Zelendinov, and his victims were two patients, one of whom, a man named Evgeny Vakhtin, died from his injuries. The doctor says he was standing up for a nurse, whom Vakhtin allegedly offended. The incident wasn't publicized until January 8, when security-camera footage of the fight leaked online. Before this, neither the local media, Russia's Investigative Committee, nor the police reported anything about the attack. Zelendinov was released on his own recognizance after being charged with negligent homicide. Meduza's special correspondent Daniil Turovsky looks at what happened that day in late December.

From early in the morning on December 29, 2014, 56-year-old Evgeny Vakhtin, a Belgorod native, was feeling ill with a stomach ache. By the late afternoon, when he began vomiting blood, he called his wife, Inna Sergeyeva, who was out of the house.

At 9:30 p.m., Sergeyeva returned home to their duplex in a suburb outside Belgorod. She couldn't go to the hospital at the time, so she called Aleksandr Avilov, a family friend, and asked him to accompany her husband to the hospital. Soon, an ambulance arrived, scooping up both Vakhtin and Avilov. 

When they arrived at the hospital, only the night staff was on duty. During those hours, Belgorod's paramedics brought anyone they picked up to this facility. According to the newspaper Moskovskii Komsomolets, the hospital was having its office holiday party that night. 

At the front desk, Vakhtin was told he would need to submit to several tests. Together with Avilov, he was transferred to another wing of the hospital, where he underwent a painful and invasive medical procedure performed by nurse Alina Kiktenko: a hose was inserted into his stomach. According to Avilov, the nurse at first praised Vakhtin for his patience, saying “Good job, good job.” But when she began to pump his stomach, Vakhtin “accidentally jerked his leg and hit the nurse, but it wasn't a kick—he just mechanically wanted to stand, when water began flowing into his stomach,” Avilov later explained. When this happened, according to Avilov, the nurse declared, “Is every single man going to beat me up?”

Alina Kiktenko describes these events rather differently. According to her, Vakhtin was drunk during the procedure, and he intentionally kicked her in the thigh, knocking her to the floor, where she hit her head. 

After the procedure, Vakhtin and Avilov went one floor down to the internal medicine department, where they later got into a fight with surgeon Ilya Zelendinov. The whole thing was filmed on security cameras in a video that lasts 11 minutes and 28 seconds. (View discretion is advised.) 

In the video, a man in a blue hospital shirt (Zelendinov) enters the room, followed by Kiktenko. Zelendinov can be heard asking, "Who?" and the nurse points at Vakhtin, who's sitting down shirtless. Zelendinov takes him by the arm, and shoves him into the neighboring office. Avilov approaches Zelendinov from behind, and the doctor turns to him and suddenly delivers several powerful blows to the man's head. When Vakhtin returns from the other room, Zelendinov punches him square in the forehead, sending him instantly to the floor, where he doesn't move again. 

At the point, Zelendinov turns again to Avilov, whom he pummels again. The nurses in the room yell, “Security! Security!” and “Please stop!” and Avilov is removed from the room. 

Avilov then waits in the hallway, bleeding from his nose and mouth, without receiving any kind of medical aid. A few minutes later, he looks into the room where his friend is still lying on the floor, and he asks, “Hey, are you alive?” Vakhtin doesn't answer. Now back in the room, Zelendinov begins administering first aid to Vakhtin. The nurses start shouting again: “We need a resuscitation!” and “Does anyone have a shot of adrenaline?”

Avilov next calls Vakhtin's wife and says, “They're pumping your husband.” At first, Inna Sergeyeva doesn't understand what he is talking about, but later she realizes that Avilov was describing CPR. 

Alina Kiktenko, whom Zelendinov was defending, stands in the room crying with her hands over her face. Zelendinov then asks Avilov how much his friend had to drink. Avilov says he doesn't know, and he's removed from the room again.

Another nurse now administering CPR says to Vakhtin, “C'mon, c'mon. Don't die. It's New Year's.” A few seconds pass and all the hospital staff begin speaking in a whisper. They take Vakhtin by the hands and feet into the office next door, and another nurse quickly mops up the blood on the floor in the room. 

It was at this time, that Inna Sergeyeva, Vakhtin's wife, arrived at the hospital, finding Avilov, who told her what happened. She ran to the room where the fight took place, and then to the hospital's waiting room, where staff told her they didn't know anything about her husband. It was only in the emergency room that a doctor finally told Sergeyeva that her husband was in critical condition. She later said she “felt that he was already gone.” She sat down on the hospital's steps and called the police, reporting her husband's murder.

Sergeyeva then found the office of head physician Vladimir Lutsenko and asked him to locate Zelendinov. Lutsenko told her that Zelendinov was no longer in the building, having gone off duty. As she was leaving Lutsenko's office, however, Sergeyeva almost immediately encountered Zelendinov directly in the hospital corridor. He began to apologize, saying he was “ready to cut off his own hands.” Sergeyeva shot back in response, “Doctors like you should have their heads cut off.”

Zelendinov, 32 years old, had worked as a surgeon in the hospital since 2009. According to Lutsenko, there's never been a single complaint against him by a patient—neither oral nor written—and he's never prompted any disciplinary measures: “He proved himself to be a competent, disciplined, and diligent physician.” On December 30, the day after the fight, the hospital fired Zelendinov. 

“We haven't seen him in the hospital since,” Lutsenko said, adding that none of the hospital's staff tried to hide what happened. “I found out right away, and we called the police without hesitating for a minute. A criminal case was opened the same day. Nobody tried to hide anything.” 

On December 11, Lutsenko lost his job, too.

The hospital's staff refused to speak with Meduza about Zelendinov, who also isn't talking to reporters. 

For ten days, between December 29 and January 8, no one in the local media or the government said a word about the incident. Belgorod blogger Sergei Lezhnev said that, early in the morning on December 31, he received a text message from a friend that said, “Serge! In one of the city's hospitals, a doctor beat up a patient and killed him!” Lezhnev said he called the police and the local branch of the Investigative Committee, but everyone told him that they had no information about any such case. 

On the evening of January 8, footage of the fight appeared on the website of the television station 360: Podmoskovye, and it instantly spread across online social networks. The next day, police announced that an investigation into Vakhtin's death was already underway. “Several media outlets have reported that law enforcement agencies wish to conceal information about an incident that occurred in a Belgorod hospital on December 29. The representatives of several media outlets claim that the criminal case was launched only after video from the hospital was published on the Internet. These reports are untrue,” the Investigative Committee's Belgorod branch explained in a public statement. 

Investigators say they opened a criminal case immediately after examining Vakhtin's body. (Forensics experts found that he suffered a serious head injury.) Zelendinov was released on his own recognizance, “insofar as the crime was classified as a minor offense.” Also regarded as a mitigating factor was Zelendinov's permanent residence in Belgorod. “Murder is the intentional infliction of death. The suspect has to be aware of the inevitability that his actions will kill, and he follows through knowingly. If the victim had stayed on his feet, or if he'd fallen and hit his head not on such a hard surface [the floor], the result would not have been so critical,” investigators explained in their statement.

On January 10, the head of Russia's Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, took personal control of the case. The same day, Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova asked the Federal Service for Surveillance in Healthcare to inspect the hospital in Belgorod.

A few days after video of the attack circulated online, many Russian Internet users (mainly on Vkontakte) started sharing hashtags in support of Zelendinov, writing #ОнНеУбийца (“He's not a murderer”) and #ИльяСтобойКоллеги (“Ilya, your colleagues stand with you”). Memes about the hospital in Belgorod have already sprung up online, such as this one. (The caption reads, “That feeling you get when you leave a Belgorod hospital and you're still alive.”)

Ilya Zelendinov faces up to two years in prison, if convicted. Zelendinov's lawyer, Sergei Krivorodko, says his client repents his actions. “He doesn't understand how all this happened,” the attorney said. Zelendinov reimbursed Vakhtin's family for the costs of his funeral ceremony, paying roughly 100,000 rubles ($1,300). 

On January 11, investigators detained Zelendinov and announced that they will seek to have him formally arrested.