Wagner group mercenaries on a tank in Rostov-on-Don Photo: AP
When Anya Pekareva heard that an 85-year-old woman had been killed in Vyatskie Polyany, a small town 500 miles from Moscow, where some of her relatives live, she considered it a strange coincidence.
Two days later, her parents told her that the woman turned out to be her grandmother, killed by a former prisoner who had returned home to the village after fighting in Ukraine as part of the notorious group of Wagner mercenaries.
Peskareva, a 36-year-old nurse from St. Petersburg, reacted to the news so strongly that her parents feared she would stage a protest against the war, risking arrest and criminal prosecution.
“After the murder of her grandmother , I just drew the line with friends. I said: “Everyone who supports the war is guilty of killing my grandmother,” she told The Telegraph.
The murder of Yulia Buyskikh in March was the first of many committed by former militant prisoners who returned home to Russia . “This was the first case of this kind. But now I’m tired of reposting news about other cases,” said Ms. Pekareva.
Across the country, Russians are now living with convicted murderers and rapists — a disastrous consequence of Vladimir Putin's decision to bolster his forces by recruiting fighters from prison.
Anya Pekareva with her grandmother Yulia Buyskikh, killed by a former prisoner who returned home after fighting in Ukraine for the Wagner group
Four days before Grandma Pekareva's murder, local television aired a six-minute news report saying that a local man, previously sentenced to 14 years for the murder of another woman, had returned home to the nearby village of Novy Burets and «lived a quiet life.» .
Village residents, mostly elderly women, bundled in shawls and winter coats, filled the local community center, where the police chief tried to solve their problems.
The young man made his presence known in the village early, staggering through the streets with “a bottle of beer in one hand and a pitchfork in the other” and shouting: “I’m going to kill you all.”
A local farmer said the milkmaids were too much scared to go to work in the pre-dawn shifts.
In an unexpectedly frank speech, the head of the local police, Vadim Varankin, told the villagers that Ivan Rossomakhin had left the Wagner group, which was then fighting in the bloody siege of Bakhmut.
< p>Mr. Varankin said that the mercenary promised to leave the village as soon as he was released from custody for breaking a car.
“I’m not going to put up with him here until May. We agreed that on Tuesday we would put him on the train and that I would never see him here again,” he said.
But instead of boarding the train on Tuesday, Rossomakhin ended up in the neighboring town of Vyatskie Polyany
Ms. Pekareva remembers her grandmother as a kind and generous woman who didn’t even bother to lock the front door.
She lived alone and sometimes offered bed and breakfast to people, often high school students, stranded in Vyatskie Polyany during snowstorms. Rossomakhin, her killer, was one of those she granted asylum to.
The tens of thousands of Russian prisoners first recruited by Wagner last summer typically signed six-month contracts, meaning thousands of criminals were released under as of this spring.
When reports of the Buysky murders first emerged, Wagner's former boss Yevgeny Prigozhin tried to defend his recruiting campaign by saying pardoned convicts were unlikely to ever commit crimes again.
p>He condemned the murder of Buisky, saying of his former fighter: “It’s too bad that he committed a crime.”
The late leader of Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin (center) with troops in an unknown location Photo: Prigozhin’s press service/AP
Police in Russia do not keep statistics on crimes committed by former Wagner fighters, but journalists across Russia have reported brutal killings almost every week since their contract began to expire.
Returned Russian fighters are under suspicion from Ukraine. have killed at least 17 people and are accused of at least four rapes this year, according to a public records count.
The latest massacre in the city left five men and one woman dead. a picturesque village near Russia's border with Finland last month.
Their alleged killers, two friends and former cellmates in their 30s with previous convictions for numerous robberies and drug trafficking, had just finished serving with two mercenary groups, including Wagner.
There doesn't seem to be much to it. . It's a pattern of killings carried out by Russian convicted mercenaries, who in some cases appeared to attack people at random.
Kirill Chubko, a 37-year-old event host, and his 19-year-old assistant Tatiana Mostiko were returning from a party to Ust-Labinsk in southern Russia in late April when they got a flat tire.
Chubko called his wife and asked her not to worry and to go to bed while they waited for the car repairman. A few days later, their bodies were found in a nearby forest.
Police determined that three men were responsible for the murder. One of them was sentenced to 18 years in prison for armed robbery on highways before he was recruited by Wagner.
Daria Chubko-Andreeva, Kirill's wife, who still keeps a photo of herself and her baby as her social media profile picture, told The Telegraph she was struggling to get any details about the investigation from investigators.
Like the Buyskikh’s granddaughter, Ms. Chubko-Andreeva is trying to contact other victims of Wagner’s mercenaries on Russian soil.
She also recently launched an online petition calling on the court to give life sentences to her husband's killers. “I’m learning to live again,” she said.
Other Russian families face the prospect of coming face to face with the killers of their loved ones.
One day in June, Oksana Pekhteleva’s friend sent her a message with a photo of a sand-clad man grinning at the camera. -colored military uniform and helmet. It was Vlad Kanyus, the man who brutally murdered her daughter Vera three years ago.
Vera Pekhteleva’s family is devastated that justice has not been served triumphed, and her killer is no longer in prison
In the city of Kemerovo, more than 2,000 miles north of Moscow, rumors quickly spread that Kanyus, sentenced a year earlier to 17 years in a maximum security colony for beating his 23-year-old ex-girlfriend to death, was now free.< /p>
The colony where he was sent refused to communicate with the victim’s family, citing confidentiality rules, and the Russian Ministry of Defense denied that he was among their soldiers.
The only evidence that he was released from prison was a letter from the bailiffs, who informed the family that they had abandoned attempts to collect court-ordered compensation from the defendant in connection with his “departure to the combat zone.”
“Mom Vera is very worried. She's terrified. Can you imagine what this man did to her daughter?” — said Vladimir Pekhtelev, Vera’s uncle
Mr Pekhtelev, who does not follow the news and has no idea there are other families in similar circumstances in Russia, said the family was devastated that justice had not been served in their case.
“ He killed her in three hours and now he wants to get away with it? This is unfair. We just want justice, that’s all,” he said.
The long-term effect of the mass pardon of Wagner convicts on crime rates in Russia is not yet clear.
The Soviet Union faced with a similar situation at the end of World War II, when thousands of prisoners were released after fighting the Nazis. The crime wave eventually subsided as many of the former prisoners ended up back in prison.
The same thing could happen in Russia, said Vladimir Kudryavtsev, a criminologist at Florida State University.
“ We don't have enough data to know whether they are committing these crimes because they were traumatized during armed conflict, or whether it is an average repeat offense that would have happened anyway,” he told The Telegraph.
“ But we know that countries emerging from armed conflict often experience a surge in violence.”
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