A Moscow regional court sentenced Kaliningrad doctors Elina Sushkevich and Elena Belaya to nine and nine-and-a-half years in prison, respectively, for murdering a premature infant. Belaya and Sushkevich maintain their innocence.
This marks the end of a complex seven-year legal saga that has polarized Russia’s medical community. The case centers on accusations that the doctors deliberately killed the infant in 2018 to avoid skewing the hospital’s statistics. The prosecution argued that chief physician Belaya ordered anesthesiologist Sushkevich to inject the infant with a lethal dose of magnesium sulfate. Russian neonatologists and hundreds of healthcare workers have denounced the charges as ”absurd” and unsupported by scientific evidence.
The case has bounced through Russia’s court system with wildly different outcomes. Jurors initially acquitted the doctors in Kaliningrad in 2020, but prosecutors appealed. A Moscow court then convicted them in 2022 with similar sentences, but the Supreme Court ordered a retrial after four jurors alleged the judge improperly pressured them. The latest conviction followed a unanimous jury verdict in July 2025.
