A 10-year-old is stabbed to death by a fellow student at an elite school. A teenager in an affluent village repeatedly knifes his math teacher to death. Teenage crime up almost a fifth in a year. Baby killers go free. Murderers wander the streets, pumped up from military service. And veterans commit scores of murders after returning from a brutal meat-grinder war.
The dark and bloody scenario would be the stuff of nightmares and dystopian novels.
But it is the reality of day-to-day life in Russia, unleashed, say critics, by President Vladimir Putin’s tactics to win the war he inflected on Ukraine.
“This is the price of the war Putin started,” Olga Romanova, the founder of Russia Behind Bars, told the Daily Beast. “Putin pardoned over 50,000 criminals, eliminated the role of punishment by the court system, sent killers to Ukraine to fight, turned them into heroes, and when the unpunished criminals returned, they killed hundreds of Russians. The younger generations are witnessing crimes without punishment.”
The number of juvenile crimes in particular climbed 18 percent this year, with more than 14,000 Russian teenagers charged with crimes.
The latest attack makes clear that not even Russia’s elite are immune: The 10-year-old was murdered in a school in the affluent village of Gorki-2 on the outskirts of Moscow. A 15-year-old fellow student admitted the killing, according to authorities, and to stabbing a security guard and a member of school staff—a spree fueled by white supremacist ideology, authorities said.
There’s no shortage of horror stories in the news about brutal crimes by children.
On Monday, a group of teenagers severely beat their schoolmate in a schoolyard in annexed Crimea. In Siberian Novosibirsk, two teenage boys forced their schoolmate into deep snow and beat him over the head. Some crimes have been especially heinous: a 14-year-old teenager stabbed his schoolmate and a neighbor to death in Irkutsk; 13-year-old schoolchildren kidnapped, beat, and tortured an old woman in the city of Nizhny Novgorod for several days, local news reported earlier this year.
Experts say it’s impossible to ignore the connection between this rise in brutal violence and the Kremlin’s glorification of war. On state television, military service is glamorized and teenagers are encouraged to join, with one new movie about a young rapper who joins the war clearly designed to appeal to Russian teens.
And the fallout from Russia’s war is routinely ignored. A study of court filings published by the independent news outlet Verstka earlier this month found that more than 1,000 Russians have been killed or injured by Russian soldiers returning from Ukraine since the full-scale invasion in February 2022. At least 551 people were killed in incidents involving veterans, while 274 of those victims were murdered, according to the report.
One of the key ways to get canon fodder for Putin’s war is to recruit criminals. Families of crime victims have protested Putin’s practice of pardoning killers in exchange for their participation in the war, hoping those who murdered their loved ones would remain behind bars. But the Kremlin has defended the practice, insisting the freed killers are “atoning” for their crimes on the battlefield.
Dozens of pardoned killers have been freed from prison to serve in Ukraine, among them a notorious hitman, Aleksey Chebotaryov, who was convicted of 12 murders. In July, a Russian court sentenced Chebotaryov to 15 years in prison. But by September, he was free again after signing a contract with the military less than a month after his verdict was handed down, Kommersant reported at the time.
In November 2024, a 49-year-old lawyer in the Sverdlovsk region, Alexander Gook, killed his 42-year-old girlfriend, Olga Soroka, and her 6-year-old son, Alyosha. The grisly crime wasn’t discovered until months later, in April 2025, when Olga’s head was found in a wooded area. Gook soon confessed to investigators that he had disposed of the other remains at a dumpsite.
Russians discussed the horrific case on the social media platform Vkontakte. “Earth should not tolerate men like him,” one woman wrote. “Our police forgot how to work. Convicts escape punishment,” another user wrote.
The victims’ family thought Gook would be punished with a life sentence, but Russian authorities made a different decision: The criminal case vanished together with Gook. In October, Olga’s family learned that he had been freed in exchange for fighting in Ukraine.
“This is not even comparable to the criminal wars of the 1990s,” Romanova told The Daily Beast. “Putin is decriminalizing all kinds of crimes, demoralizing Russia – generations will suffer the consequence.”
There are already glaring signs of Russia’s youngest beginning to follow the example set by the Kremlin.
Inna Sergeyeva, the mother of a 7th-grader in St.Petersburg, is one of many parents to sound the alarm. She said her son and his friends have been playing war games almost every day. “I am worried that children do not understand that violence is a crime: They watch killing on TV, pretend they are killers on the street and on video games,” she said. “Violence and bullying are scary among children, I am worried about my son.”
“By militarizing the country and pardoning thousands of criminals, Putin has opened a Pandora’s Box,” Ilya Shumanov, a board member of Transparency International Russia, said. “He has inspired violence in Russia.”
Many fear things are only going to get worse.
“There are lots of guns on the black market; any student can buy a gun on the darknet under double VPN defense,” Gennady Gudkov, a retired lawmaker now living in exile, told the Daily Beast. “I am happy I took my children and grandchildren away from Russia, it is a very dangerous place for children.”
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