A Russian convicted murderer who was sentenced to 11 years in prison after he killed his girlfriend and put her body through a meat grinder has been pardoned after fighting against Ukraine, his mother said.
The mother of Dmitry Zelensky told the Russian media news outlet 59.RU that her son was pardoned after serving less than half of his sentence.
Zelensky, a veteran of the Second Chechen War, confessed to the 2018 murder of his 27-year-old girlfriend, Tatiana Melekhina, in 2019, 59.RU reported.
He admitted to strangling her to death after a quarrel, before disposing of her body in a horrific way to try to cover up his tracks, the media outlet said.
According to 59.RU, Zelensky told investigators during an interrogation that he dismembered her body, processed it in a meat grinder, collected the bones in three bags, and threw them into the river.
I would say ~10 years is normal for a murder in Germany and other European countries. I don’t know about current Russia but here the idea is jail time should lead to rehabilitation and a bit of punishment. In the US it is much more focused on punishment.
10 years for ending someone else’s life? I’m glad we have longer sentences for that here in the U.S. Don’t get me wrong–I’m all for prison reform and introducing rehabilitative elements to reduce recidivism, but Europeans seem to have more concern for criminals than they do for the victims of crime.
10 years in a Russian prison is an extremely brutal punishment. Here’s a mild example of what happens there https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1kQblKeOT4E