A court in the southern Russian city of Volgograd sentenced a veteran who fought in Ukraine to seven years in prison for the murder of his grandmother, the court’s website announced on Friday.
According to criminal investigators, Alexey Zharikov became angry with his grandmother when he returned from work to a home they shared and proceeded to beat her to death with a wooden chair.
When considering Zharikov’s sentencing, the court took into account his military service, the independent Russian media outlet Verstka reported. Verstka noted that it is “unknown when exactly Zharikov returned from war”. However, photos Zharikov posted to social media in September 2023 depict him in combat gear holding military-grade weapons.
Zharikov told the court that he became violent because his grandmother “began to express everyday complaints to him”.
Zharikov’s grandmother managed to escape her home after she was beaten and asked a neighbor to call for help. After Zharikov was arrested by local authorities, his grandmother was taken to a hospital nearby and later died in care. Doctors attributed her cause of death to cerebral edema or swelling of the brain.
While at the hospital, Zharikov’s grandmother told a police officer that her grandson had become violent when he blamed her for taking his phone’s SIM card. During court proceedings, Zharikov said that he thought his grandmother had purposely hidden the SIM card from him.
At the trial, Zharikov denied that he ever hit his grandmother with a chair, maintaining instead that she “fell many times” while walking out into the home’s yard. However, Zharikov conceded to investigators before the trial that he often had conflicts with his grandmother and, on the day of her death, hit her many times, causing her to fall to the ground.
Neighbors of Zharikov and his grandmother testified at the trial that Zharikov beat and “tortured” his grandmother frequently. Zharikov denied the allegations and said that he “loved his grandmother very much”.