A military court in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk said on September 12 that Private Oleg Gorbachyov of the Russian armed forces was sentenced to eight years in prison for beating his wife to death.
According to Military Court No. 24, Gorbachyov attacked his wife at home in April, punching her at least 35 times.
The woman died of injuries sustained in the attack. The court did not specify why the punishment was the minimum allowed eight years in prison. The maximum sentence for such an offense is 15 years.
Since Russia launched its full-scale aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, Russian courts have given mitigated sentences to individuals who fought in the war in Ukraine.
The number of crimes in Russia committed by ex-military personnel, including former inmates recruited from prisons, has been on the rise since early 2023 as soldiers returned from duty in Ukraine.
Also on September 12, media reports in Russia's Far Eastern island of Sakhalin said police in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk detained a person who participated in Russia's invasion of Ukraine on suspicion of attacking two persons with a knife and a stone.
The victims are hospitalized in serious condition, the reports said.
The reports identified the suspect as Vitaly Prisukhin, born in 1982 in the city of Kostroma, who might be the person who was sentenced to 16 years in prison for double murder in Kostroma in 2011.
The Vyorstka Telegram channel, citing Interior Ministry statistics, reported on September 11 that during the period between January and August this year, the number of serious and extremely serious crimes registered in Russia was the highest in the past 13 years.
In total, 403 537 such crimes were registered across Russia and Russia-occupied Ukrainian territories. The highest number of such crimes were registered in the Moscow, Krasnodar, and Rostov regions.
The Interior Ministry's Research Institute had predicted a sharp rise in serious and extremely serious crimes in 2023-2024, emphasizing factors such as men returning from the war in Ukraine and an increase in the number illegal firearms available on the black market since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.