Russian woman with disabilities who killed abusive husband receives reduced sentence as another woman faces a felony conviction

A woman living in the Transbaikal region of Russia has been sentenced to a year and a half of limited house arrest for killing her husband, who regularly abused her and her children. The woman will have to receive approval to leave her neighborhood or move, and she will face a 10:00 PM – 6:00 AM curfew. However, the time she spent in jail awaiting trial will count against her sentence.

The woman received a sentence reduction on appeal after an initial sentence of 8.5 years in a prison colony. Court documents show that on the day she killed her husband, she called the police twice while he beat her and her daughter. When he attacked them again while they were sleeping that night, the woman, who uses prosthetic legs, asked her son to bring a knife and stabbed her husband, ultimately killing him when he continued to attack her.

Meanwhile, in the Black Sea resort town of Gelendzhik, another woman has been convicted of murder in similar circumstances, and a local court did not recognize her claim to self-defense. 28-year-old Kristina Shidukova also killed her husband while he was beating her after a pattern of abuse. One of her attorneys wrote after her conviction that the prosecution, judge, and jury forewoman in Shidukova’s trial had committed a number of severe violations that prohibited the jury from considering the defendant’s self-defense claims.

Both cases come amid an escalating grassroots effort to draw attention to family and intimate partner violence in Russia. That effort has centered around the case of the Khachaturyan sisters, who killed their father after enduring violent abuse for years on end. A recent study by independent Russian journalists showed that a majority of Russian women serving time for murder killed a partner or close relative who abused them.