When the Soul Can’t Keep Silent

Kommersant has learned that a military court has begun hearing the criminal case against Senior Lieutenant Aydyn Zhamidulov, a platoon commander in the Airborne Troops, and his subordinate, Private Alexei Dorozhkin. The Russian Investigative Committee alleges that the men kidnapped a young woman who had threatened the officer that she would tell his wife about their relationship and took her to their unit’s temporary deployment point as a Ukrainian spy. There, they stabbed the victim to death and blew up her body in an attempt to conceal their crime. Zhamidulov gained renown for writing patriotic poems during his combat training and was shown reciting them on Telegram channels.

The criminal case against Senior Lieutenant Zhamidulov and Private Dorozhkin was submitted to the Southern District Military Court, sitting in Rostov-on-Don. The men are accused of the kidnapping and brutal murder of a resident of the Luhansk People’s Republic per articles 126.1, 105.2, 30.3, 33.4, and 244.2 of the Russian Criminal Code.

In the file of the case, as investigated by military investigation units at the Russian Investigative Committee, it is reported that Zhamidulov is twenty-eight years old, a native of Kazakhstan, and lived in the Pskov Region. He has a higher education, is married, and was raising two daughters.

In January 2022, Zhamidulov signed a contract with the Defense Ministry and, in the rank of senior lieutenant, served as commander of a parachute platoon in an airborne assault regiment of the famous 76th Airborne Division.

In late 2022, a video was widely circulated in social networks and the media in which Lieutenant Zhamidulov recited a poem of his own about the those involved in the special military operation. At the end of the recital, the officer stated that his family was proud of him and was waiting for him to come home.

Dorozhkin was mobilized on 1 January 2023. Ranked as a private, he served as a senior scout in the Airborne Troops.

According to investigators, at about eight p.m. on 13 January 2023, Zhamidulov and other military men, including Dorozhkin, were drinking hard alcoholic beverages at the Rainbow Cafe in Luhansk. About half an hour later, local resident Valentina Davronova, with whom Zhamidulov had previously been in an intimate relationship, entered the cafe.

A row broke out between the senior lieutenant and the twenty-three-year-old woman. Fearing that Ms. Davronova would report their relationship to his wife, Zhamidulov decided to deal with the young woman, the case file says. He told his subordinates that he would take Ms. Davronova to her current boyfriend.

The young woman was put in the back of a KamAZ truck, and when the truck arrived at the unit, Zhamidulov tied her hands with duct tape. Dorozhkin, who went with them, was ordered by the senior lieutenant to tape Valentina’s eyes, which he did.

To avoid questions from his subordinates and make his actions look legitimate, the investigators note, Zhamidulov told them that Ms. Davronova had served in the Ukrainian army from 2018 to 2021 and had tattoos featuring Ukrainian symbols on her body. He also alleged that she was engaged in intelligence on behalf of the Ukrainian armed forces.

The young woman was taken to a soldier’s bathhouse, where Zhamidulov stabbed her about two dozen times in different parts of her body. At that time, the commander of a reconnaissance platoon combat vehicle, Sergeant Roman Pleshcheyev, entered the bathhouse (his case will be tried separately). Zhamidulov ordered him to finish off the victim. Not wanting to kill her, but fearing negative consequences on the part of the senior lieutenant, Plescheyev stabbed Ms. Davronova with his knife in the area of her left shoulder and right leg.

At 12:20 a.m., Dorozhkin entered the bathhouse, and Zhamidulov instructed him to finish what he had started. Pleshcheyev left the room and Dorozhkin killed the victim by stabbing her in the area of her heart.

Having made sure that the young woman was dead, Zhamidulov ordered his subordinates to take the body outside the temporary deployment point and detonate it with three F-1 grenades so that the deceased could not be identified and the cause of her death could not be determined.

Nevertheless, the crime was solved literally while the trail was still hot. All three defendants were detained and then remanded in custday by a military court.

The case is now in preliminary hearings, and is expected to be considered on the merits this summer. Zhamidulov’s lawyer Natalia Kokhan refused to comment on the case without vetting her answers with her client.

Source: Kristina Fedichkin, “Paratrooper poet accused of murder,” Kommersant, 29 May 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

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WHEN THE SOUL CAN’T KEEP SILENT

Aydyn Zhamidulov was mobilized from the Orenburg Region. As a civilian he worked as a welder, but now he serves in an Airborne Troops reconnaissance unit. He has a wife, two daughters, and his parents waiting for him at home.

“I was retrained in my specialty. In the short period of mobilization combat training, everything — camouflage, identifying the enemy, working with topographic maps, artillery fire — is very easy to learn,” Zhamidulov said.

All of the things he saw and his interactions with his fellow soldiers inspired Aydyn to write poems. They are plain but honest and poignant, straight from the heart.

Always our ancestors fought evil.
They wrote history with blood, with the pen.
They weren’t afraid to go all the way.
They removed shackles, they united hearts.
Now, our brothers, it’s our turn
To defend our country, our home, and our people.
To do justice, to open their eyes.
The enemy is in deep,
like a needle under the skin.
Let us strike down the puppeteers,
the servants of evil,
Who pull the strings
Of bewildered people,
Of gray-haired mothers
shedding tears
For them, the lives of people
are just a game.
We must put a stop to this
once and for all!

Source: Yulia Reutova, “Victory will be ours! Komsomolka found out what the mobilized are talking about,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, 15 December 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to The Insider for the link.