August 10th 2023.
Demyan Kevorkyan, a former member of the Wagner mercenary group, is accused of committing a double murder after returning to his hometown in Russia from Ukraine. Kevorkyan had been serving an 18-year prison sentence since 2016, and was one of the many convicts recruited from Russian prisons to fight in Ukraine in exchange for the promise of freedom if they could survive six months on the frontlines.
Kevorkyan was arrested following the murders of a young man and woman on their way home from work in Pridorozhnaya, a town in the Krasnodar region of southwest Russia. One of the victims was 19-year-old Tatyana Mostyko, who worked as a children's entertainer in the area. According to witnesses, the victims and Kevorkyan got into a dispute after their car encountered a punctured tyre, and the former convict and two other suspects fatally stabbed them both.
Kevorkyan had been initially imprisoned for his involvement in a carjacking gang, which had seized a vehicle not far from the location where the later murders occurred. He had been sentenced to 18 years in prison, but was released after only six following a visit to the prison by Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.
In June 2023, President Vladimir Putin admitted that he had granted presidential pardons to prisoners who had returned from participating in the Ukraine war. Prigozhin has claimed that the reoffending rate among ex-Wagner recruits is 10% to 20% lower than the average for released criminals. However, the director of the prisoners’ rights organisation Russia Behind Bars, Olga Romanova, believes this number could be higher due to a law which prohibits criticism of the Kremlin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.
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