25-year-old Vladislav Kanyus, who killed student Vera Pekhteleva with particular cruelty, escaped a 17-year sentence for the crime by going to war in Ukraine. Human rights activist Alena Popova reported this with reference to the mother of the deceased in her Telegram channel.
She suggested that Kanyus could join the Wagner PMC or another PMC that recruits prisoners for the war.
The mother of Vera Pekhteleva, Oksana, said that Kanyus publishes photos in social networks in camouflage and with weapons in his hands. Relatives thought it was a fake, but then they made a request to the Federal Penitentiary Service. They received an answer saying that Kanyus left on 04/28/2023 at the disposal of the GUFSIN in the Rostov region. The letter was signed at the end of April, and it turned out to be in the mailbox of Pekhteleva's mother on June 14th. Complaints about the lack of information on the stay and movement of Kanyus are not answered by the relatives of the deceased girl.
“How should a cassation session be held by videoconference if a maniac, fanatic, murderer is most likely out of the zone? Can someone explain to me how I can live with this? This monster, being freed from a criminal offense, having escaped from the front or switched sides, can at any moment kill each of us, the victims, out of revenge, ”said the mother of the deceased.
In July 2022, a court in Kemerovo sentenced Kanius to 17 years in prison for the brutal murder of his former lover Vera Pekhteleva. The court found that Pekhteleva had suffered at least 111 injuries and bodily harm. The murder happened in January 2020, when the girl came to Kanyus to pick up her things. The defendant, having learned about Pekhteleva's new relationship, did not let her out of the apartment, took away her phone, and then beat her "using various objects, inflicted several stab wounds and squeezed her neck with a cord." Neighbors heard the girl's screams, tried many times to call the police, but the call squad never arrived. A criminal case was initiated against the police officers under Part 2 of Art. 293 (negligence, negligently entailing the infliction of grievous bodily harm or death of a person).
In June, NGS24.RU and TVK reported that Alexander Khakonov, ex-LDPR deputy from the Taseevsky District Council of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, escaped jail time for killing his wife by joining the Wagner PMC. He was sentenced to 9 years and 8 months in a strict regime colony. The case file says that Khakonov hit his wife 19 times in the face, neck, arms and legs, she fell to the floor. He then stabbed her several times. Khakonov himself claims that he offered his wife to have sexual intercourse with him, she refused and “began to humiliate him like a man,” so he did so.
In April, in the Nizhny Novgorod region, a Russian who returned from the war in Ukraine killed his wife in front of their children, aged 6 and 7. The Insider drew attention to the fact that former prisoners who returned from the war, who are taken to the Wagner PMC, after the release promised by the authorities and arrival in their hometowns, terrorize the local population. They also become addicted to alcohol or die from overdoses of psychoactive substances, and some prisoners return to crime again: several cases of murders are already known in Russia.
