The plunder and violence unleashed in occupied Ukraine has reached Russia’s own towns
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.
The news outlet 7×7 examined posts on the social network Vkontakte addressed to Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the Belgorod border region, and found 78 messages about looting in local towns over the first three years of the full-scale war in Ukraine. Many of the people who appealed to the governor had to repeat their comments numerous times to get the authorities’ attention.
For example, 7×7 found that residents of the border town of Novaya Tavolzhanka began writing in June 2023 that Russian soldiers had occupied several evacuated homes and were systematically looting and destroying them. Journalists found photos shared online showing smashed televisions, torn-out radiators, and valuables stacked in piles, apparently to be hauled away.
Several locals reported on social media and directly to 7×7 that officials have offered various excuses. Mikhail Proshutinsky said he left Novaya Tavolzhanka to escape Ukrainian shelling. When neighbors alerted him to uniformed strangers living in his evacuated home, Proshutinsky turned to a dozen different agencies for help. Eventually, the military prosecutor’s office confirmed that the interlopers had been evicted, but there was no follow-up, and he has yet to receive any compensation for the extensive damage to his home.
Other locals seeking help described endless bureaucratic runarounds, forever being redirected to another phone number at a different agency. A woman named Maria reached out to the governor in October 2022 on behalf of residents of Krasny Khutor and Novaya Naumovka, claiming that local police officers refused to respond to looting because of Ukrainian shelling in the area. Meanwhile, the regional government has continued to claim that military police, territorial defense units, and volunteer patrols are guarding border towns around the clock.
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.
7×7 found that complaints about looting in the Belgorod region far outnumber news reports confirming any investigations into such crimes. In the few cases that have reached trial, prosecutors have charged offenders with theft rather than “prohibited means and methods of warfare.” Well into Russia’s ”special military operation,” district officials claimed that they’d yet to record a single case of looting. Governor Gladkov first acknowledged the phenomenon in June 2023, vowing to increase local patrols and protect people’s property.
Meanwhile, in the Kursk region
Police in the neighboring Kursk region have opened roughly 200 cases on charges of looting, though it’s unclear how many of these crimes were committed by Ukrainian troops during their months-long occupation. Local news reports confirm that police have arrested some Russian soldiers for looting, and a handful of cases have attracted media attention.
In April 2025, a serviceman named Dmitry Stenkin attacked a family in the town of Giry, killing the mother, wounding the father, and briefly kidnapping their two young daughters. He was soon arrested, but the family reportedly fears that the military might try to cover up the incident. Stenkin is a convicted rapist who has been in and out of prison for the past several years for offenses that include threatening murder, attacking a police officer, and evading parole. Alexey Kostrikin — the accused murderer apprehended in the Belgorod region on November 5 — is also a serial criminal. According to the news outlet Agentstvo, he participated in the gang rape of a woman in 2003, a year after he kidnapped and raped another woman.