The trial of Alexei Poltavets, who confessed to a double murder and spoke of his connections to members of the terrorist group "Network," has begun in Ryazan.
Criminal case against Alexey Poltavets The case was received by the Ryazan District Court at the end of August, but the first hearing on the merits took place only today, November 12.
Poltavets attracted the attention of journalists in February 2020, when protests in support of the defendants in the so-called "Network" case were held across the country: young men detained in Penza и Petersburg On suspicion of plotting a coup, FSB officers were accused of torturing with electric shocks.
It is Poltavets said journalists from the publication Meduza that the "Network" defendants were indeed acquainted with each other and were connected to the double murder in the forest near Ryazan. As follows from Poltavets’ confession, in April 2017, he, together with a member of the “Network” Maxim Ivankin killed his acquaintances - a 19-year-old Ekaterina Levchenko and 22 year old Artem Dorofeev, who initially helped them sell drugs, and then decided to surrender to the police.
Poltavets' interview helped the Investigative Committee find the remains of the murdered girl (Dorofeev's body was found in the fall of 2017, but they couldn't identify it for a long time).
Only after Meduza's publication did the large-scale protests surrounding the "Network" case cease. The defendants called it an FSB provocation. Meanwhile, Maxim Ivankin never revealed his whereabouts in April 2017. Last year, the jury recognized He was found guilty of murder, and the court sentenced him to 18 years in a maximum security penal colony.
Nothing is known about the fate of Oleksiy Poltavets: according to investigators, he fled to Ukraine in 2017 and has not contacted journalists since his interview with Meduza. The criminal case against him is being tried in absentia, and the trial is being held behind closed doors because he was a minor at the time of the murder in 2017.
Lawyers familiar with the situation believe that the materials in Poltavets' criminal case are virtually identical to those in Ivankin's. The sentences will likely be similar, too.
The evidence that the jury relied on when convicting Maxim Ivankin, NotMoscow gathered here.
Photo: The murder scene in the Ryazan forest/Novaya Gazeta
