A convicted rapist and murderer freed and pardoned by Vladimir Putin to fight in his war against Ukraine has been jailed for the brutal murder of a 22-year-old woman.
Tsyren-Dorzhi Tsyrenzhapov, 42, was previously sentenced for killing and dismembering 18-year-old Ekaterina Skvortsova and throwing her severed head from a 12th-floor window.
Despite the seriousness of his crime, Putin signed his pardon.
Shortly after completing six months in the war and being released from military service, he killed the woman, 22, in the Siberian village of Ugdan. His last victim was not named by authorities.
The Chita District Court sentenced Tsyrenzhapov to 14 years in a maximum security penal colony.
Tsyrenzhapov was one of thousands of murderers, rapists and hardened criminals who have been released into Russian society after serving in Putin’s army. Reports indicate that dozens have committed new crimes upon his return home.
Convicted rapist and murderer Tsyren-Dorzhi Tsyrenzhapov (pictured) has been jailed for the brutal murder of a 22-year-old woman.
Tsyrenzhapov was previously sentenced for killing and dismembering 18-year-old Ekaterina Skvortsova (pictured) and throwing her severed head from a 12th-floor window.
Despite the seriousness of Tsyrenzhapov’s crime, Putin (pictured last week) signed his pardon. Shortly after completing six months in the war and being released from military service, he killed the woman, 22, in the Siberian village of Ugdan.
Tsyrenzhapov was wearing a hood and had his face covered when the judge announced his sentence.
Details of his previous case were revealed, when he killed Ekaterina Skvortsova, described as a strip club waitress.
The evil killer threw part of Ekaterina’s dismembered body into a local river.
He then drank all night and the next day threw his severed head along with other body parts and his blood-stained clothes out of a 12th-floor window of his rented apartment.
The macabre spectacle was seen by children and teenagers who were playing.
Local schoolboy Igor Shalaev, then 15, said: “It was my friends and I who found the body parts.” It was very scary.’
The victim’s mother, Svetlana Skvortsova, 48, told how she went to the morgue to identify the body.
“I walked in and saw a cart full of pieces of meat,” he said. ‘My legs were like jelly. I did not understand anything.
‘They could have put her on a table and covered the body parts with a sheet. It was completely inhuman to see her like that.’
She and her ex-husband Igor paid £215 to sew up the gruesome body parts for his funeral.
Tsyrenzhapov had served less than three years of a 14-year prison sentence when Putin released him to fight in Ukraine.
Tsyrenzhapov was wearing a hood and his face covered when the judge announced his sentence.
Details of his previous case were revealed, when he killed Ekaterina Skvortsova, (pictured) described as a strip club waitress.
The evil killer threw part of Ekaterina’s dismembered body into a local river. He then drank all night and the next day threw her severed head along with other parts of her body and blood-stained clothes out of a 12th floor window (pictured) of her rented apartment. .
Tsyrenzhapov (pictured) had served less than three years of a 14-year prison sentence when Putin released him to fight in Ukraine.
Putin’s drastic recruitment campaign began in mid-2022, after he and his supposedly powerful armed forces were driven out of kyiv in the first months of the war, and again by Ukraine’s lightning counteroffensives in the summer.
It quickly became apparent that Russia’s initial invasion force of around 190,000 men was not sufficient to meet the Kremlin’s goal of subjugating all of Ukraine.
So, while Putin’s forces were held back in the east of the country, the Russian army set about recruiting thousands of prisoners from prisons to swell its ranks.
Reports suggest that Wagner, the Russian paramilitary group led at the time by Yevgeny Prigozhin, recruited extensively in prisons in July 2022, increasing its ranks by 49,000.
The warlord, who would later stage a coup attempt against the Kremlin and, two months later, die in the explosion of a burning plane, was seen in pictures appearing in person in prisons around St. Petersburg. He said, “We need his criminal talents.”
In October 2022, the Russian Defense Ministry reportedly followed suit. It is believed that Wagner, and later Russia, offered the prisoners a simple deal: serve in the army for six months and let the man go free with a bonus of 100,000 rubles.
Prigozhin told potential recruits that 10 to 15 percent of them would return from the “zinc coffins” of Ukraine. He also said that Wagner’s convicted soldiers would be used as shock troops, leading attacks on Ukraine’s defenses.
The reality, according to captured Wagner soldiers, was that they were used as “little more than cannon fodder”: they were ordered to rush in large numbers against defensive positions to wear down kyiv’s reserves and find defensive weak points.
Skvortsova’s body was found by children and teenagers who were playing and described the sight as “very scary”. In the photo: Ekaterina Skvortsov
The victim’s mother, Svetlana Skvortsova, 48, said that when she went to identify the body at the morgue “she saw a cart full of pieces of meat.” In the photo: Ekaterina Skvortsova.
Thousands of convicted soldiers were deployed to the “meat grinder” Battle of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian media reported that convicts were “thrown to the front after 2 or 3 weeks of poor training and used as cannon fodder” by the most Wagner elitists.
All soldiers who tried to flee or refused orders were executed.
According to Prigozhin himself, of the 49,000 prisoners recruited by Wagner, only 32,000 returned. Independent researchers believe the real number is even lower, around 20,000, according to the BBC.
This would suggest that between 35 and 60 percent of the soldiers recruited into Wagner’s prisons were killed in Ukraine.
Nor was it just Wagner who recruited prisoners. In April 2023, it became known from Ukraine about the creation of Storm-Z units by the Russian Ministry of Defense. After receiving only ten or fifteen days of training, these units were incorporated into the fatigued Russian regular forces.
But unlike regular Russian forces, many of whom were forcibly recruited in a separate recruiting drive from Moscow in 2022, Wagner’s surviving recruits were allowed to return home after just six months.
This has meant thousands of hardened criminals are released into Russian society after witnessing first-hand some of the most brutal fighting on European soil since the end of the Second World War.
Desperate to get soldiers for his faltering war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin recruited troops from Russian prisons in 2022 and promised pardons to thousands of convicts. Pictured: Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin talks to convicts taken to fight in Ukraine.
Thousands of convicted soldiers were deployed in the “meat grinder” Battle of Bakhmut (pictured), where Ukrainian media reported that the convicts were “thrown to the front after 2-3 weeks of poor training and used as cannon fodder ” by Wagner’s most elite units.
Since then, it has emerged that dozens of pardoned criminals, including pedophiles, murderers and even cannibals, continued committing crimes once they returned home.
Last month, bbc reported that former prisoners are no longer offered forgiveness or freedom after six months.
Instead, they face harsher conditions and, according to a member of the Storm V convict unit, the prisoners now “have to survive until the end of the war.”
He said that “before you could improvise for six months,” but now he has warned: “If you sign up now, prepare to die.”