The conviction no longer matters as long as they fought in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has initiated a policy of presidential pardons for prisoners who agree to fight alongside Russia. Among these men, one convicted of Satanist and cannibalistic murders.
Nikolai Ogolobiak was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2010. He was pardoned by the Russian president and returned home at the beginning of November, according to the 76.ru news portal from the Yaroslavl region where the person concerned settled. and where his crimes had been committed. At the time, these murders hit the headlines and shocked Russia.
Shy debate
This pardon and those of other convicts, like one of the accomplices in the 2006 assassination of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, opened a timid debate in Russia on the merits of this policy. However, the Kremlin, questioned on the subject once again on Wednesday, does not foresee any change.
“The question is not new, it has been raised several times, and currently everyone is looking closely at these lists of pardoned people,” noted Dmitri Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson. “But I repeat, these are conditions [de grâce] precise, linked to a presence on the front line, to a certain duration spent on the front line, linked to participation in assault groups, and it is after that that there is grace,” he explained , adding that “there is no review” of this policy.
Families of victims shocked
Families of victims in other cases denounced this measure, especially since they had not been informed of these releases. Questioned on the subject at the beginning of November, Dmitri Peskov defended these pardons, believing that “people convicted, including for serious crimes, atone for their crime with blood on the battlefield”.
Tens of thousands of Russian detainees have joined the front in Ukraine, often under contracts with paramilitary groups such as the Wagner Group. If they survive six months of fighting, they are eligible for a pardon. These men often served in the most dangerous areas of the front and, by the admission of Wagner’s late boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, were used as cannon fodder.
According to the site 76.ru, which says it interviewed the father of Nikolai Ogolobiak, 33, the latter was seriously injured and is now disabled. He and five other young people, all teenagers at the time of the events and claiming to belong to a Satanist sect, had been condemned for the ritual murders of four other teenagers whom they had cut up before eating pieces of their corpses.