As it became known to Kommersant, the Mytishchi City Court of the Moscow Region, at the request of relatives, stopped the criminal prosecution of the well-known nationalist Maxim Martsinkevich (Tesak). The criminal case, which was based on a dozen confessions of Tesak himself, was closed on non-rehabilitating grounds – in connection with the death of the accused. The family of the nationalist stopped fighting for his good name after they were denied a posthumous trial by jury.
According to Kommersant’s information, the petition to terminate the criminal prosecution, which was granted, was submitted to the Mytishchi court by Maxim Martsinkevich’s father. In a statement, the author agreed to the termination of the criminal prosecution of his son in connection with his death. According to the law, such a motivation is a non-rehabilitating circumstance – earlier Tesak’s relatives categorically refused such an option.
Recall that, according to the ICR, Maxim Martsinkevich committed suicide in the Chelyabinsk pre-trial detention center in the fall of 2020, but his relatives believe that Tesak could have been killed after being tortured during the “shipment” – he was supposed to be taken from the colony to Moscow, where a number of murders were being investigated, committed by the nationalists.
As lawyer Aleksey Mikhalchik, representing the interests of the nationalist’s family, explained to Kommersant, although the investigation has repeatedly suggested that relatives stop his criminal case, their current choice is not connected with these proposals. The lawyer noted that after the Moscow Region Court at the end of 2022, relying on the decisions of the Supreme and Constitutional Courts, rejected the request of relatives that the case against Maxim Martsinkevich be considered posthumously with the participation of the jury, his principals “lost interest in the process.” Relatives of Maxim Martsinkevich, the defender emphasized, were primarily interested in “finding out in court the circumstances of Maxim’s death, but this was completely ruled out during the trial by one judge.”
Therefore, Mr. Mikhalchik summed up, “a general decision was made to give consent to dismiss the case.” Moreover, the lawyer noted that the victims also did not object to this option, referring to the difficulties associated with coming to court sessions.
As Kommersant previously reported, the now terminated case against Tesak was separated in 2022 from a large investigation in which six more of his associates were charged with murders (Article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) committed on the basis of ethnic hatred.
The Mytishchi City Court divided the investigation materials into two parts: he left the case against Tesak to himself, and submitted the materials against Andrei Kail, Alexander Lysenkov, Maxim Khotulev, Pavel Khrulev, Alexei Gudilin and Semyon Tokmakov for consideration to the Sergiev Posad City Court. There, preliminary hearings were held on the case, and on Wednesday, February 22, the first hearing on the merits was scheduled.
The criminal case was initiated on September 6, 2007, after a video of the murder of two men in the Losiny Ostrov park, not far from Mytishchi, was posted on the Internet. One of them was identified as a native of Dagestan Shamil Udamanov, the identity of the second victim, presumably a visitor from Central Asia, could not be established. The recording showed that the criminals cut off the head of the first victim, and the second was killed with a shot in the back of the head. But who exactly committed this atrocious crime, law enforcement agencies could not find out for a long time, therefore, in 2017, the investigation of the criminal case in the Main Investigative Committee of the ICR was suspended. However, three years later, the production was resumed, and several cases were merged with it at once. As a result, the ICR came to the conclusion that in the autumn of 2003 Maxim Martsinkevich and his associates committed the murder of two people on the territory of the Smolensk region. In December of the same year, it follows from the case file, the defendants killed two more people in Sergiev Posad, Moscow Region. After that, they sent appeals to the media and embassies of a number of states demanding that the borders with the Central Asian republics be closed. The heads of the two victims were planted by the defendants in different places in the east of Moscow.
Moreover, the materials of the investigation were largely based on the testimony of Tesak himself, who issued more than a dozen confessions shortly before his death, in which he reported on the murders – according to him, both the defendants and his other supporters took part in them.
Part of his testimony was later confirmed by Maxim Aristarkhov and Sergei Marshakov, accomplices of the double murder in Mytishchi in 2007, who cooperated with the investigation. They were sentenced in a special order to 16 and 17 years in a strict regime colony, respectively. The defense of Maxim Martsinkevich believes that he made confessions, unable to withstand the torture, but the investigation refused to initiate a criminal case on these facts, considering that Tesak confessed and died voluntarily.