The court recognized the legal sentence of children’s doctors Bela and Sushkevich

The court in Moscow left unchanged the sentence handed down earlier to Kaliningrad doctors Elena Bela and Elina Sushkevich. They were sentenced to 9.5 and nine years of imprisonment, respectively. Last year, they were found guilty of murdering a premature baby in a maternity hospital. They do not admit guilt. Their defense believes that the jurors were under pressure from the judge, the jurors themselves confirmed this.

In November 2018, in the perinatal center of Kaliningrad, a native of Uzbekistan, Zamirakhon Akhmedova from Uzbekistan, gave birth to a son weighing only 700 grams at the 24th week of pregnancy. The chief doctor of the center, Elena Belaya, performed resuscitation of the boy. Children’s intensive care specialist Elina Sushkevich was called to help. It was not possible to save the child.

On November 7, 2018, an unknown person called the police and reported that the doctors had deliberately killed the child. An investigative team went to the scene of the incident, a criminal case was initiated. According to the investigation, the doctors deliberately injected the boy with a fatal dose of magnesium sulfate “so as not to spoil the hospital’s statistics” and record the baby in the documents as stillborn. In September 2022, the court found them guilty of murder.

Sushkevich and Belaya claimed that the child died due to severe prematurity, and the magnesium content in his blood is normal, but magnesium sulfate itself is not a poisonous substance.

In their last word, the defendants called the jury’s verdict unfair and asked the court to issue an acquittal. Sushkevich noted that she did everything she could to save the child, so now she is not ashamed to look “in the eyes of the parents of my patients.”

• In December 2020, the jury of the Kaliningrad Regional Court acquitted Sushkevich and Beluya. But at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office, the sentence was overturned, and the case was transferred to Moscow. In October 2021, the Moscow Regional Court arrested the doctors and placed them in a pre-trial detention center. The trial began in February 2022.
• The case received wide public resonance both in Kaliningrad and in the medical community as a whole. Actions of doctors and patients were held in support of doctors, leading doctors of the country, including the president of the National Medical Chamber, Leonid Roshal, spoke in their defense. Doctors doubted that the baby’s death was caused by magnesium poisoning.