Redeeming his crime with blood, Kremlin defends Putin’s pardon for student killer

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, without mentioning Kanus by name, said on Friday that the president’s pardon could be obtained in two ways, according to the Meduza website.

The standard way is for the pardon to be recommended to the head of state by a chain of relevant authorities: from the prison administration to the leadership of the region and the federal district and the central commission for these cases to the presidential office.

According to Peskov, the second possibility is that “he will redeem his guilt with blood.” The Kremlin spokesman added that this also applies to people convicted of the most serious crimes. “They pay for crimes in blood on the battlefield, in assault brigades, under fire,” he added. The president’s spokesman declined further comment.

Kaņus pleaded not guilty before the trial, which ended last July. According to the indictment, he murdered his ex-girlfriend Vera Pechtělevová after she came to his apartment to pick up her belongings. The dog inflicted more than a hundred different injuries on her body—the first twelve hours before he finally strangled her with an iron cord. Vera was twenty-three years old.

In July of this year, five policemen also heard the verdict, who ignored at least seven phone calls from Kaňus’s neighbors, concerned by the screams of the tormented victim. However, the police got away without real punishment: they received suspended sentences for negligence.

“President pardoned murderer, torturer, monster”

“I’m not alone. Believe me, there are at least hundreds of such mothers. We live in different parts of our vast country. Someone is afraid, someone doesn’t want to publish their story, someone has folded their hands in their lap, someone has no physical or moral strength because of the statute of limitations for the crime,” said Oxana Pechtělevová to the independent Bereg website. She realizes that she is fighting windmills herself.

“No one will help us, no one will listen to us,” she said. According to her, “all the state media” is silent and the president, as his office confirmed, “pardoned the murderer, the torturer, the monster”, even before the appeals process.

Meduza recalled that the prisoners were actively recruited into their ranks by Wagner’s mercenary group. The former leader of the group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, promised the new mercenaries that after half a year of service they would be pardoned by the head of state. It was later revealed that the prisoners had been pardoned by a secret decree even before they were sent to war.

There are no official figures showing how many convicts were recruited for the war and pardoned. There are also no figures showing how many convicts lost their lives in the war and how many of them returned home from the war. But there are reports from various parts of Russia that ex-convicts, after returning from the fighting, are committing crimes again, even the most serious ones, the Bereg server added.