“It’s best to avoid traveling by train”: Women in Russia’s Belgorod Region face violence from soldiers

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“He strangled me like he knew what he was doing”

At half past five in the morning on Oct. 28, 2025, Svetlana left her home in the border town of Shebekino in Russia’s Belgorod Region to walk her three dogs. In the morning twilight, she noticed a man on a bicycle wearing “mottled military camouflage, with an assault rifle slung over his back like a backpack.” As Svetlana was nearing the entrance to her apartment building, the man came right up to her, took the rifle off his back, and pressed it to her chest. “Bitch, follow me, or I’ll shoot you right now,” he said. Terrified, Svetlana’s dogs scattered.

The soldier grabbed her by the collar, pulled her hood over her head, and dragged her away from the residential area to where it was still dark. Struggling, she felt for the trigger on his rifle and pulled it, hoping the sound of a shot would draw people out, but no one came.

The soldier beat her on the head, strangled her, and threatened her with a knife. “He strangled me like he knew what he was doing — in a way that wouldn’t kill me right away, but instead put me into a trance, subdue me, and make me suffer,” Svetlana recalls.

She was lucky: one of the neighbors eventually heard the noise outside and appeared with a flashlight. The soldier immediately released Svetlana and ran away. The neighbor tried to catch him but could not keep up.

It later emerged that the attacker was Alexei Kostrikin, a repeat offender previously convicted of theft and robbery who had been recruited to fight in the war. Later that day, after the attack in Shebekino, he went to the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka, where he killed a man and raped the man’s wife. As Svetlana explained, a ballistic examination revealed that the shell casing she fired and the bullet that killed the man in Tavolzhanka came from the same rifle.

Svetlana was summoned by the police to help identify her attacker. She was shown a photo and played a voice message. She immediately recognized the attacker’s voice. “He was talking to a taxi driver in a flat, quiet voice devoid of any inflections,” Svetlana recalls. “I immediately said that it was his voice.”

Svetlana and other residents are baffled as to how a person with a criminal past was allowed to move freely through border towns with a weapon, and why military police were not monitoring him. “How did these people end up in the army?” locals wonder in chat groups, as if the mass recruitment of prisoners to the front is news to them.

After that morning, Svetlana began having panic attacks. She has trouble sleeping, is afraid to return home after dark, and feels short of breath if she hears footsteps behind her. Doctors diagnosed her with a nervous breakdown. At the moment, she is receiving counseling and taking strong antidepressants. She cannot stop thinking about what could have happened if her neighbor had not scared off the attacker.

Wave of harassment

In the absence of separate statistics on crimes committed by military personnel, the scale of the problem can only be inferred from indirect data. According to court records, Russia saw 2,000–2,200 cases of rape and 8,000–8,300 cases of other sexual offenses annually between 2022 and 2024. By comparison, the period of 2019–2021 saw an annual average of 1,800–2,000 rape cases and 6,700–7,500 cases of other sexual offenses. The peak occurred in 2023, with 2024 incidents still remaining well above pre-war levels. Meanwhile, the proportion of convictions has remained consistently high at around 85–90%.

Typically, information about crimes committed by military personnel in Russia comes from media coverage (in the most high-profile cases), press releases from investigative authorities, and individual court rulings. Russia’s border regions, which are marked by permanent presence and a high concentration of active-duty personnel, have produced no shortage of incidents.

In Belgorod in the summer of 2025, a 39-year-old city resident went to the police to report an attempted rape. According to the woman, on the night of July 13-14, 36-year-old soldier Magomed Mirzaev from Dagestan attacked her in her own apartment. She had let the soldier in herself, after which he attempted to rape her and then fled. Mirzaev was declared wanted on suspicion of sexual assault.

Journalists found that the woman had been at least the third known victim of Mirzaev's. In 2013, Mirzaev assaulted and robbed a young woman in Izberbash, Dagestan. In September 2022, he was detained for raping a 21-year-old student from Belarus in St. Petersburg. According to Fontanka, he injected her with an unknown drug, leaving her unable to fight him off.

At that time, Mirzaev was already a soldier and had been fighting in Ukraine since April 2022. After his sentence, he signed another contract with the Ministry of Defense, was pardoned, and was sent back to the war, ending up in Belgorod Region as an active-duty serviceman.

In November 2024, the media covered another case in Belgorod Region. The defendant, also a soldier, was accused of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl. The Astra Telegram channel identified the serviceman in question as Corporal Alexander Andreev, 41. The investigation established that Andreev had raped a schoolgirl from the village of Veselaya Lopan three times. After one of the counts, he tried to coerce her into silence by paying her 180,000 rubles ($2,370), but raped her again a week later. Andreev was arrested and is under criminal proceedings.

Another sentence was handed down by the Bryansk Garrison Military Court in September 2023. A contract soldier was sentenced to 15 years in a maximum-security penal colony for sexually abusing his 10-year-old stepdaughter. His personal details are redacted from the court records, but according to the investigation and to his wife's testimony, he participated in Russia's invasion of Ukraine from August to November 2022. Upon being discharged, he became violent and took to drinking. In March 2023, he hit the girl and committed “violent acts of sexual nature” against her.

Local residents, frustrated with the legal system, sometimes take matters into their own hands. In August 2025, Valery Malikov from the town of Lgov was arrested in the Kursk region. He was accused of killing a serviceman who, according to the investigation, had been sexually harassing his partner. Regional courts reported that on the evening of Aug. 2, a man in military uniform knocked on Malikov’s door asking for cigarettes. The men got acquainted and decided to celebrate Airborne Forces Day together. During the gathering, the guest proposed that the lady of the house have sex with him for money, which she refused. Later that night, Malikov saw that the serviceman continued harassing his partner, and killed him with an axe. In the morning, he buried the body near the house.

“How come you don’t want to talk? I was at the front!”

Harassment by servicemen has become so widespread that women in the Belgorod Region are now afraid to take trains. The routes connecting Belgorod to Moscow are popular among groups of servicemen, according to The Insider’s sources. Carriages — both compartments and third-class options — are frequently filled with soldiers who spend time in the dining cars, get drunk, and behave aggressively. Other passengers, the women observed, try to avoid getting involved in any sort of conflict with them — soldiers returning from the front are seen as people who are accustomed to violence and are often armed, and many civilians are apprehensive about “messing with the heroes,” understanding that in the event of an incident, the state is likely to side with the military.

One such incident took place this past summer on a train from Belgorod to Saint Petersburg, recounts Oksana [name changed], a mother of two from Belgorod. She was traveling on a lower aisle berth in a third-class carriage in the company of elderly women and a serviceman, who occupied the berth above Oksana’s. The first thing that caught Oksana’s eye about the man was his large khaki backpack, “the size of a man.” The soldier boarded the train in Kursk and went straight to the dining car. When he returned later that night, noticeably drunk, he began harassing Oksana. When she said bluntly she did not want his company, he became furious: “What do you mean you don’t want to? I was at the front! You have to talk to me.” According to Oksana, other male passengers “either were asleep or chose not to respond” to her pleas for help. The only ones who came to her aid were the elderly women opposite. Later, the train attendant arrived and, with great difficulty, managed to calm the serviceman.

Impunity for soldiers

The problem is not only the sheer number of criminals convicted of rape and murder among Russia’s frontline personnel, but also the very practice of enlisting in the army as a way to avoid criminal punishment. Such policies send a clear signal of impunity: even if you do something that would warrant a prison sentence, you can still just go back to the front. Statistics from the Ministry of Justice show more than a tenfold increase in the number of criminal cases frozen at the stage of court proceedings. The spike was particularly noticeable in 2024.

The increase occurred in the category of so-called “other cases,” which includes the defendant's inability to participate in the proceedings due to being called up for military service — a provision adopted in the spring of 2024. More than 17,000 cases have been suspended in court, with an untold number having been frozen at the stage of investigation after a suspect made the choice to solve their legal troubles by signing a contract with the Ministry of Defense.