A Wagnerian who returned from the war was arrested for mass murder

In Karelia, a former mercenary of the private military company “Wagner”, a previously convicted 37-year-old Igor Sofonov, who recently returned from the war in Ukraine, was arrested on charges of murdering six people. He denies guilt.

As reported by Sever.Realii, on August 1, the bodies of six local residents with knife wounds were found in the village of Derevyannoe in the Prionezh region of Karelia. The murders were committed in two private houses located two hundred meters from each other. In the first house, two men, a father and a son, were killed, in the second – three men and a woman. They tried to burn both houses to hide the traces of the criminal.

Six hours after the discovery of the corpses, the police detained the suspects in the mass murder – the already mentioned Sofonov and 38-year-old Maksym Bochkarev.

According to the media, both previously served long terms of imprisonment in the same colony: the first – for attempted murder, robbery, robbery and theft, the second – for rape, violent acts of a sexual nature, and also for robbery, robbery and theft. It was in the colony in 2022 that Sofonov was recruited by Wagnerites and sent to Ukraine to participate in hostilities.

According to the residents of the village of Derevyannoe, he returned from the war in the spring of this year. Telegram channel “Daily Karelia” with reference to Sofonov’s fellow villager claims that after returning from the front, the former fighter of PMC “Wagner” drank a lot. Nothing is reported about Bochkarev’s biography, his lawyer says that Bochkarev denies the charges and was beaten by the police.

• In the summer of last year, after several military defeats by the Russian army on the territory of Ukraine, PMC “Wagner” and personally its founder, businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is close to Vladimir Putin, began to recruit prisoners into their ranks and send them to war. Convicts who agreed to take part in hostilities had to spend six months on the front line, they were forbidden to retreat and surrender under the threat of execution. Those who remained alive after six months were promised freedom. Thus, according to various estimates, 50 to 70 thousand fighters were recruited into the PMC. According to Prigozhin, 32,000 of them have already returned and received pardons for their participation in hostilities.
• Recently, mass media have regularly reported on serious crimes, including murders and rapes, committed by fighters of the PMC “Wagner” who returned from Ukraine. So, at the end of May, a man from Wagner, suspected of raping two schoolgirls aged 10 and 12, was sent under arrest in the Novosibirsk region. In St. Petersburg, at the beginning of June, a mercenary returning from the war robbed a store. Another former fighter of PMC “Wagner” was arrested for double murder.