The plunder and violence unleashed in occupied Ukraine has reached Russia’s own towns
The plunder and violence unleashed in occupied Ukraine has reached Russia’s own towns
The plunder and violence unleashed in occupied Ukraine has reached Russia’s own towns — Meduza
When Russian soldiers spilled into Ukraine in February 2022, reports soon followed of rampant looting in captured towns. Homes, museums, theaters — even schools — were stripped of everything from food and clothing to computers and washing machines. The stories of theft and destruction revealed the brutality of Moscow’s invasion. Today, a growing body of evidence shows that the Russian military has also inflicted some of this cruelty on its own people. On November 5, 2025, after a region-wide manhunt, soldiers in Belgorod captured one of their own, Alexey Kostrikin, who murdered a local homeowner and raped his wife in late October before killing again on November 3.
Kostrikin is one of more than 170,000 violent criminals recruited from prisons and pretrial detention centers to fight in Ukraine. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, he joins the more than 1,130 ex-con veterans who came back from the front in the war’s first two years only to resume a life of crime.
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Many civilians living near the Ukrainian border fear looting by Russian soldiers more than Kyiv’s attacks. Some residents have stayed in their homes despite the shelling and loss of access to food and medicine.
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