In 2014, the former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist from the liberal publication Novaya Gazeta.
Now, just nine years into his sentence, Khadzhikurbanov has been pardoned, after spending six months fighting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. As far as Putin is concerned, this makes Khadzhikurbanov a patriot.
Khadzhikurbanov is far from the only violent criminal to earn a pardon in Russia by joining Putin’s army in Ukraine. It is a practice inspired by none other than Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in a plane explosion two months after his Wagner Group mercenaries staged an aborted rebellion in June.