Returned Russian soldier accused of domestic abuse kidnaps and kills a women’s shelter resident in Irkutsk
In Irkutsk, a Russian soldier who had returned from the war in Ukraine killed a woman after holding her hostage for more than five hours.
According to Alexander Sobolev, who runs a crisis-support charity called Obereg, the man had spent months abusing his wife and their seven-year-old son. He kicked and beat them, cut them with a knife, and subjected them to constant verbal and psychological abuse. Obereg took the woman and her son into its women’s shelter and reported the abuse to the police multiple times. Despite those reports, Sobolev said, the soldier remained free.
On January 27, the man abducted another woman staying at the shelter and took her to his apartment. Irk.ru and the Telegram channel Baza reported that the hostage was a friend of the soldier’s wife.
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After law enforcement negotiated with him for several hours, the hostage-taker killed the woman. “At 2:30 a.m., he came out on his own, having killed the hostage. He strangled her — an innocent woman, the mother of two girls,” Sobolev wrote on Obereg’s Telegram channel.
Sobolev called for a “thorough review of the actions of all law enforcement agencies that night.”
“Psychopaths, rapists, and killers, hiding behind their participation in the ‘special military operation,’ are now committing horrific acts on a regular basis, convinced of their impunity,” he said. “He ignored police calls, fled his unit in Rostov, beat people every day, and was certain nothing would happen to him — except that he might be sent back.”
The killing fits a broader pattern. According to figures compiled by the outlet 7×7, at least 294 people have been killed over the past three years by former soldiers after they returned home. Courts, the publication noted, have often treated participation in the war as a mitigating factor in murder cases.
In January, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that more than 8,000 participants in the war had been convicted of “civilian” crimes since the start of the full-scale invasion. Among those killed by returning soldiers, the outlet wrote, were 52 victims of domestic violence, including wives or partners, children, mothers, grandmothers, and sisters. It added that judges generally hand down lighter sentences to defendants who have returned from the war than to those in similar cases without military experience.
Cover photo: Evgeny Biyatov / RIA Novosti / Sputnik / Profimedia