3/8/21
In late February of this year, Russia’s criminal investigative agency announced that it had referred to a court an investigation into criminal negligence by two police officers that happened on January 14, 2020 in the Siberian city of Kemerovo. Around the time when the investigation was announced, Kemerovo law enforcement issued an official video, which briefly described how, at around 5 am on Jan. 14, a police hotline registered several calls reporting “a woman’s screams” coming from a flat in the city. The information was passed on to duty police officers, who, the authorities stated on the video, “failed to take necessary action.” Behind these dry official statements lies a horrible story of a 23-year-old woman, Vera Pekhteleva, who was killed by her boyfriend, Vladislav Konyus, behind the closed doors of his apartment. Before her death, Pekhteleva told Konyus that she was leaving him. That night she came by to collect her things from the apartment they shared. She never left. In Russia, police fail to respond to domestic violence complaints or refuse to act on them with frightening regularity. Russian media often report on deaths from domestic violence that could have been prevented. The weak police response is part of Russian authorities’ systemic failure to properly address domestic violence.
Konyus beat Pekhteleva for over three hours. The neighbors who called the police could hear her screaming the entire time. They could also hear her attempts to open the door, but each time, Konyus dragged her away and continued to beat her. Getting progressively more alarmed, the neighbors, who gathered outside the flat, kept calling the police. They called seven times, but the police never arrived. The neighbors finally broke the door down with a sledgehammer, only to find Pekhteleva’s dead body inside. The list of her injuries paints a grim picture. Her body was covered in cuts and bruises, she had multiple traumatic brain injuries and a broken nose. After hitting Pekhteleva, at least 56 times, Konyus choked her with a cord from an iron. Despite the circumstances of her killing, the police officers who failed to respond are being prosecuted under the lesser of the criminal code’s two charges for criminal negligence, instead of the charge that specifies penalties for negligence that leads to death or grievous bodily harm. The lack of a stand-alone domestic violence offense and poor data collection means there are no reliable statistics, but according to a recent independent study, at least 5,000 women were killed in domestic violence episodes in 2018. These numbers stand in stark contrast with Interior Ministry data, which claims that 253 women died in “family-related” conflicts in 2018.