Anna Boltynyuk, from the Kaluga region of central Russia, lost her 18-year-old daughter Yana when she was raped and murdered in 2014.

Now the man responsible has been freed after serving just three years of his sentence, following a campaign by the Kremlin to persuade convicts to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine in exchange for a presidential pardon.

The murderer, Evgeny Tatarintsev, disappeared last year from a prison colony reportedly visited in person by Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in his drive to recruit men to join the paramilitary group. Boltynyuk made numerous appeals to the federal prison system to find out where he was, and was finally told he had been pardoned.

“Tatarintsev is roaming free,” Boltynyuk told the FT. “I am going to my daughter’s grave, while he is going to a barbecue with his friends.”

Tatarintsev is among thousands of prisoners who took up the offer of a pardon in exchange for serving on the battlefield in Ukraine. Most joined the war with Wagner, but others are now joining separate defence ministry-sponsored groups to boost numbers for Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Now a growing number are returning home. While most Russian men forcibly conscripted in a 2022 mobilisation drive are still fighting under military contracts with no defined end date, prisoners are treated differently: they are considered “volunteers” and sign contracts for just six months.

Most are coming back to the same communities they terrorised before their arrest, and some have begun to reoffend. Victims and their families must watch in fear and indignation as pardoned perpetrators slip back into normal life.

They are not officially informed that the criminals they expected would be locked up for decades have suddenly been freed. Instead, victims and those close to them tend to find out from rumours, or when they suddenly stop receiving the small sums of compensation money that the convicts are ordered to send them from prison by the courts.

Communities across Russia are dealing with the shock of finding the perpetrators of sometimes gruesome killings back in their midst. In Berdsk, in Siberia, residents discovered last month that a man who had killed a woman in 2019 in order to steal and sell her car had returned to the city when his profile was spotted as a driver on a local taxi app.

The man appears to have been pardoned after fighting in a prisoners’ battalion with the Wagner force. The militia’s leader Prigozhin pioneered the mass deployment of prisoners to the frontline in Ukraine; after he was killed in August 2023, the defence ministry appears to have taken up the baton.

Nikolay Ogolobyak, from Yaroslavl in central Russia, was more than a decade into a 20-year sentence for his role in the murder of four teenagers as part of an apparent satanic ritual when defence ministry officials turned up at his prison colony in the Russian Arctic. 

In November, residents of Yaroslavl were horrified to discover that Ogolobyak, now 33, was suddenly back in town, a free man.

“People say: ‘God forbid I meet a man like that at the playground.’ But I won’t do anything to anyone. I’m not going to attack anybody,” Ogolobyak reassured a local journalist in Yaroslavl, over servings of apple strudel at a city café, after his return. “I don’t want to go back to prison. I had my fill.”

Ogolobyak was arrested in 2008 after luring two young women to an abandoned area in Yaroslavl where he and his friends were staging a satanic ritual. The group stabbed the women to death, mutilated their bodies, then later killed a young couple they feared would give them up to the police.

He went to war, he said, partly to get out of jail early, but primarily “in order to atone for my sins, as they say, with sweat and blood”.

After three months on the battlefield, Ogolobyak was injured by shrapnel and sent back to Russia. In October, he was discharged from hospital, given his papers and salary, and told he could go home; on his return he gave his mother a bouquet of roses and Rbs100,000 ($1,112) and bought his father a car. He did not reply to questions sent to him by the FT on social media.

Prigozhin claimed to have recruited at least 50,000 convicts, mostly for missions that became popularly known as “meat storms”: waves of men sent on suicidal assault missions in eastern Ukraine.

It is unclear how many survived, but news about returning convicts appears with increasing regularity in local Russian media outlets. A serial killer responsible for four murders and cannibalism of some of the bodies in Sakhalin in Russia’s far east was also spotted back home in late 2023, after posting a photo in Wagner gear. Residents concluded he had been pardoned.

The Kremlin has defended the policy. Fighting in Ukraine is a legitimate path to freedom for the imprisoned, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “Even those convicted of the most serious crimes” are able to “atone for their crimes on the battlefield”.

“They are redeemed by spilling blood, by [serving in] assault brigades, under a hail of bullets and artillery fire,” Peskov said in November.

Many relatives of victims see things differently. “It’s like he pulled out a lottery ticket . . . He spent a bit of time in a trench somewhere, and now he gets to walk around a free man,” Elena Taratina, the mother of one of Ogolobyak’s victims, said in a voice message shared on a Yaroslavl chat group last month. “It kills me, the thought that he’s just here somewhere, in our neighbourhood.”

Activist and human rights lawyer Alena Popova, who is based outside Russia, said her legal aid network had helped several women afraid for their safety leave the country after their attackers were freed. She wants to organise a group so that victims and relatives can lobby the government.

“I think that the only option we have is . . . a committee of people whose children or relatives have suffered at the hands of murderers and rapists, to just unite and start demanding en masse from the prosecutor’s office, from the presidential administration, a full explanation,” Popova said.

It is unlikely to be easy, however, in a country where critics say justice serves the needs and wishes of the state. “This regime is held together by a single staple — violence — and it absolutely always supports the abusers,” Popova said. “The judicial system is always on the side of these killers. They are given suspended sentences, pardoned, their loans are forgiven . . . They are fully protected by the system, and they know it.”

Boltynyuk, whose daughter’s killer was freed, became acquainted with a woman whose 19-year-old daughter was also murdered in the Kaluga region. A man named Vladislav Korobenkov was jailed for raping, stabbing and strangling the young woman, and inflicting more than 60 blows to her head. The two grieving mothers became friends.

Their daughters’ murderers served time in the same prison colony. In 2022, Korobenkov was also freed to fight with Wagner. He has not yet returned home.

Korobenkov’s mother, reached by phone, told the FT that she did not know his whereabouts and had not been informed of any official pardon. But she believes he is still alive and being held as a prisoner of war in Ukraine.

Asked whether she supports the release of convicts in this way and how it may be affecting victims’ families, she replied: “So what if they are?” and hung up the phone.