THE DAILY BEAST
A convicted killer sentenced to 14 years in a maximum security prison in Russia got the break of his life when the notorious Wagner Group began recruiting inmates for the war against Ukraine last year—and now free, he’s murdered someone again.
Ivan Rossomakhin, 28, is accused of another murder in his native village in the Kirov region less than three years after he was ordered to spend more than a decade behind bars, MediaZona reports. During that time, he managed to avail himself of Wagner’s prison-recruitment scheme, whereby inmates receive a full pardon if they survive six months fighting in Ukraine.
Rossomakhin had reportedly only been back home in the village of Novy Buryets for eight days “on break” when a local resident discovered their mother’s dead body. She’d been badly beaten and was found with stab wounds, according to sources cited by Baza.
The outlet reports that he is in police custody and provided a confession to investigators.
No further details on the killing were immediately available, but Rossomakhin had made headlines locally just days before the murder, when residents publicly pleaded with authorities to do something about the fact that he was drunkenly wandering around the village with a pitchfork and ax, yelling, “I’ll kill everyone! I’ll cut up a whole family!”
Local coverage by a news station in the village showed footage of Rossomakhin using an ax to bust out windows of vehicles.
“We don’t sleep at night,” Galina Sapozhnikova, a local resident, told the news station.
Ruslan Rupasov, the director of a local business, said his employees were afraid to go to work with Rossomakhin on the prowl.
“We had a similar situation when we had the murder in 2019, and the people at that time were scared until they caught Rossomakhin and found him guilty. Now he’s returned, and people are again very afraid, they don’t know what to do, they are even refusing to go to work,” he said.
Rossomakhin’s first murder happened in 2019, when prosecutors said he drunkenly killed a woman who was trying to get him off her property. He was found guilty of beating her and then strangling her to death.
Locals reportedly demanded a meeting with police and officials about Rossomakhin before the latest murder but were reassured by police that Rossomakhin was due to return to the Wagner ranks any day now.
