Zelenograd Killer dies. Yuri Gritsenko, serving 22 years for a string of murders, left prison to fight in Ukraine and was killed in 2025

In 2002, Yuri Gritsenko was sentenced to 22 years in prison for a series of murders and robberies committed between April and November 2001. According to investigators, during that period he carried out 14 violent robberies against women in Moscow and the Moscow region, four of whom died as a result. The “Zelenograd Killer” would strike his victims on the head with a hammer before taking their personal belongings.

Gritsenko committed his first murder in 1993, when he beat a sex worker to death with a frying pan. He was sentenced to nine years in prison for that crime but was released on parole in 2000. Before his first murder, he had worked in the police, but was dismissed due to problems with alcohol.

Judging by the date on which his individual taxpayer number was invalidated, Gritsenko was officially declared dead on January 25, 2025. The exact circumstances of his death are unknown.

The fact that he had left his penal colony to fight in Ukraine as a mercenary was first reported by the outlet Regions in May 2024, a month before Gritsenko was due to be released from prison in Mordovia.

Shot, a Telegram channel, later claimed that Gritsenko had signed his army contract as early as September 2023, committing to serve until the end of the war in Ukraine. He went to the front in order to save up money for life after his release: he had no property to his name, as his mother’s apartment had passed to the state following her death.

Gritsenko was initially assigned to a “Storm Z” unit, but owing to health problems he was not taken on as an assault trooper. He was subsequently transferred to a medical evacuation platoon.

Gritsenko is far from the only convicted killer to have been sent from a Russian penal colony to the front line in Ukraine. In 2024, Mediazona reported on the case of Denis Zubov, a shepherd from the Volgograd region who had been sentenced to 21 years for murdering three people in 2013–2014, including his former girlfriend, her new partner and an elderly woman he had followed home from a bus. Parts of his victims' bodies were cut off as a ploy to make the crimes look like the work of a serial killer. Zubov was pardoned by Vladimir Putin after signing a contract with the military and was killed in Ukraine in the spring of 2023, just a few years into his sentence.

Others recruited from prison have survived the front only to kill again on their return.

In March 2023, Ivan Rossomakhin, who had been serving 14 years for the murder of a fellow villager in the Kirov region, came home to his native village after several months fighting with the Wagner PMC. Within a week he had beaten and stabbed to death an 85-year-old woman in a nearby town. Locals reported that he had spent the days before the killing roaming the village with a pitchfork and an axe, threatening to murder everyone. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison but allowed to go back to Ukraine in August 2024; nothing has been heard of him since.

More recently, a court in Primorsky krai sentenced Maxim Volkovoy, a former Wagner fighter with a prior murder conviction, to seven years in a maximum security penal colony for beating and stabbing an acquaintance to death days after returning from the front. The judge declined to treat his earlier conviction as an aggravating factor, citing instead his service in Ukraine and his state decorations as grounds for leniency.