A court in Simferopol has sentenced a 45-year-old local man to 13 years in a strict-regime penal colony for murdering his 41-year-old wife, months after he himself reported her missing to police. The Investigative Committee of Russia's regional department told Lenta.ru about the verdict.
The man was found guilty under Article 105 of Russia's Criminal Code, which covers murder.
The missing persons report
The court established that in October 2025 the man filed a report saying his wife had disappeared, telling investigators she was not answering calls and that he had no information about her whereabouts.
Investigators and forensic specialists from the Investigative Committee, working alongside criminal investigation officers and volunteers, launched a large-scale search operation. They examined possible reasons for her disappearance and pursued several lines of inquiry.
How the murder unfolded
Investigative and operational work eventually produced evidence tying the husband to her disappearance.
The court found that on the morning of October 4, 2025, the man attacked his wife in a car parked near Kollektivnye Sady Street, in Simferopol, driven by jealousy. He struck her several times in the head with a screwdriver and then strangled her with his hands. She suffered injuries that proved fatal.
To conceal what he had done, he drove her body to the area of the Trudovskoye rural settlement and dumped it among reeds in a drainage canal. Her body was found there on November 26, 2025.
The verdict
Investigators carried out all necessary investigative actions and forensic examinations before the case went to trial. The court sentenced the man to 13 years in a strict-regime penal colony.
Simferopol is the capital of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, an annexation not recognized by Ukraine or most of the international community. Cases there are handled through Russia's Investigative Committee, the federal agency responsible for investigating serious crimes including murder.
Lenta.ru separately reported on an earlier case in which a Russian man killed his lover's husband and was tracked down 26 years later.
