The jury delivered a guilty verdict against Elena Belaya and Elina Sushkevich, Kaliningrad doctors accused of the death of a newborn. Previously, they were acquitted by another jury in Kaliningrad on charges of organizing the murder and the murder itself, but the appeal court overturned this verdict.
According to Interfax, the consequences of this decision will be considered in court on August 30.
The resuscitator-anaesthetist of the Kaliningrad regional perinatal center Elina Sushkevich and the deputy head physician of maternity hospital No. 4 Elena Belaya are accused of killing a newborn baby who was born in November 2018 at 23 weeks of age with a weight of 700 grams. According to investigators, Belaya instructed Sushkevich to administer a lethal dose of magnesium to a premature baby. At the same time, according to the IC, deliberately false information was entered into the history of childbirth that the baby died while still a fetus.
According to the UK, Belaya thought that the death of a child would have a bad effect on the statistics and her upcoming appointment as head physician, and also wanted to “save medicines.”
In December 2020, the court acquitted Sushkevich and Belaya. But six months later, the decision was canceled . After the request of the Prosecutor General's Office, the doctors' case was transferred from Kaliningrad to Moscow, where a new process began. The department explained this decision by possible actions in support of doctors.
After that, almost one and a half thousand doctors from twenty Russian regions signed an appeal to Vladimir Putin, speaking in their defense. They compared what was happening with the “doctors' case” of 1953, which became the final of Stalin's repressions.
Earlier, many well-known doctors and the Russian Society of Neonatologists came out in support of doctors: experts pointed out that in the world the survival rate of infants with an extremely low body weight of 700 grams does not exceed 5-10%.