The 2020 murder of Vera Pekhteleva by her ex-boyfriend Vladislav Kanyus was so gruesome that even in Russia, where violence against women often goes under the radar, it caused a media outcry.
Kanyus spent hours torturing Pekhteleva before she died; neighbors repeatedly called the police to report horrifying screams coming from the neighboring apartment, but they did not show up. At trial, it emerged there had been 111 injuries on Pekhteleva’s body.
Last summer, a court in Siberia sentenced Kanyus to 17 years in prison for the murder. Pekhteleva’s family members were disappointed that the judge dismissed additional charges of rape and unlawful imprisonment, but breathed a sigh of relief that the murder charge alone would put Kanyus behind bars for 17 years.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Nine months later, in the middle of May, Pekhteleva’s mother received two photographs from an anonymous account on WhatsApp. They showed a man in military fatigues and were accompanied by a message: “Kanyus is free, and fighting in Ukraine.”
“I couldn’t believe my eyes, I tried to calm her down, I tried to say it wasn’t him, it was Photoshop. But we quickly realised it really was him,” said Vladimir Pekhtelev, Vera’s uncle.
Kanyus, it seemed, was one of tens of thousands of Russian prisoners freed early to fight in Ukraine. The vast majority ended up fighting for the Wagner Group, the private army run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who in June went rogue and launched an armed mutiny that sent shock waves through the Russian political system before it was aborted.
As part of the deal, convicts were told that if they fought for six months and survived, they would be allowed to go back to normal life without serving the rest of their sentences. Later, prisoners were also freed to fight for the regular Russian army and for other Wagner-like formations fighting in Ukraine.
When the Pekhtelevs put in an official request to prison authorities to locate Kanyus, they were told he had been transferred to the prison service of Rostov region, bordering Ukraine, and had disappeared. Activists say this is a typical administrative trail for a prisoner recruited to fight in Ukraine; there are no other plausible reasons for a transfer to Rostov.
“Nobody can tell us how he was let out, nobody gave us any answer, any explanation,” Pekhtelev said.
It is not clear whether Kanyus is still fighting, but it certainly appears he is still alive, as he has posted regular updates to an account on Russian social media network VKontakte. His account has the tagline: “There is no such thing as the right choice, there’s just the choice you make and the consequences of it.”
Last month, Kanyus responded to a message asking about his current status and whereabouts with a demand for payment in order to answer questions. Later, he locked his account.
There have been numerous reports of former prisoners surviving their Wagner stint and returning home to cause havoc. Among those freed are many who committed violent crimes against women.
Russian authorities have a long history of not taking domestic violence or threats of violence against women seriously. Now, even in those cases where offenders received jail terms, victims and their families live in fear of them returning home much sooner than expected.
Vyacheslav Samoilov, from a small town in northern Russia, murdered 33-year-old Olga Shlyamina in March 2021 and later dismembered and hid her body. He was jailed for nine years and seven months in April last year, but is now apparently free after fighting for three months in Ukraine.
Samoilov’s mother told 29.ru, a local news site in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region, that her son had fought and been injured in Ukraine, and had now been pardoned.
She said “he is cleansed before God” by his service in Ukraine.
There are also those who were jailed for rape or violence, whose victims are still alive and are now again at risk.
“We have been getting so many messages from people who are scared, especially from the regions,” said Alena Popova, a Russian women’s rights activist. “They know that if the men who tormented them come back from this war, and start to beat them again or even kill them, the police will not do anything, because now these men are seen as heroes instead of rapists or killers.”
“They are returning to a situation where they will now be setting the rules of the game,” she said. “They are all super-traumatized, nobody is working with them to socialize them, and I think there will be a wave of murder, rape and domestic violence.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS