The sleepy Russian village where a pardoned ex-convict back from Ukraine carried out butchery
The village of Derevyannoe in Karelia, northwest Russia, has a well-kept feel to it. Apple trees heavy with fruit and tidy vegetable gardens, boats on trailers ready for sailing in the nearby lake and wood stacked up high for winter.
Up above you can just about make out the sound of woodpeckers tapping away in the pine forest canopy as dogs bark fiercely behind corrugated iron. It does not look like a place for mass murder, but where does.
Irina Zhamoidina stands in front of the charred remains of her brother, Artyom Tereschenko’s home. He and her 71-year-old father, Vladimir, were murdered here on the night of 1 August when two men, both of them ex-convicts, one fresh back from the frontline, broke in and stabbed father and son to death before setting the property on fire.
Mr Taroschenko’s children, aged nine and 12, managed to escape through a window and raise the alarm.
“My dad definitely did not deserve such a death,” Ms Zhamoidina says quietly. “We are from a good family. This is not how he should have died.”
The two men then continued down the road to another house a few hundred metres away and killed all four who lived there, three men and a woman, before setting their house on fire too. A drunken binge with a dose of drugs mixed in, Ms Zhamoidina thinks – a ‘zapoi’, as they’re known in Russia – turned murderous one sleepy summer night.
One of the men, Maxim Bochkarev, was known locally as a troublemaker. He had served time at a prison colony in St Petersburg for theft, carjacking, rape and sexual assault which is where he met his partner in crime, Igor Sofonov.
Artyom Taroschenko and his wife
Sofonov, 37, had three more years to go for theft, robbery and attempted murder but was recruited straight from jail by Russia’s Ministry of Defence and sent to Ukraine, a practice started by the late Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and adopted enthusiastically by the Russian military.
“I believe that anyone who was in prison, even if he went to war, then he should be sent back when he was done for such serious crimes,” Ms Zhamoidina says. “They should not live among us because cases like this do happen.”
She is right. The catalogue of violent crimes committed by pardoned ex-offenders is picking up as they trickle back home.
In June, Prigozhin said 32,000 recruited by Wagner were heading back to Russia, their records wiped clean.
Already in the southern city of Krasnodar, a Wagner ex-convict is on trial for murdering two people on their way home from work, a charge he denies. There have been cases of murder, sexual assault, child molestation from convicted sexual offenders.
In Novy Burets, about 500 miles east of Moscow, a Wagner ex-convict murdered an elderly lady, again on a drunken binge, even after locals repeatedly expressed their alarm to authorities that he was wandering their streets.
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A few hundred metres away from Artyom’s home, four people were killed in another house
Three years ago we travelled to the Siberian city of Kemerovo to cover a case of domestic violence which had culminated in the brutal murder of 23-year-old Vera Pekhteleva. Her story had shocked the country after the audio recordings of her screams, as neighbours made repeated, desperate calls to police, went viral. In court, her uncle had sat just metres away from the killer, Vladislav Kanyus, as he was sentenced to 17 years in jail. Now from social media photos, he knows that Kanyus is a free man, recruited by the Ministry of Defence and serving somewhere in Ukraine.
“He murdered her with extreme cruelty,” Mr Pekhtelev said. “He was tormenting Vera for three hours, and now he will have been trained to fight. I just can’t imagine what will happen if he comes back.”
Leningradsky Proskpekt, in Kemerovo, the site of the murder three years ago
Blue and white corridors outside the scene of the killing in Leningradsky Proskpekt
Changes to Russian legislation in June propose allowing suspected or convicted criminals to fight but not once a verdict takes effect. The reality of Russia’s prisoner recruitment though seems a lot murkier. According to the UK’s Ministry of Defence, it is part of a “broader, intense drive by the Russian military to bolster its numbers, while attempting to avoid implementing new mandatory mobilisation, which would be very unpopular”.
It is a policy which will see hardened criminals, traumatised by war, returning in their thousands with precious little in the way of psychological support or rehabilitation to speak of. Just as with domestic violence in Russia, authorities do not engage sufficiently with these kind of social issues back home, and especially not when there is a war on. But this is the stuff which tears at the social fabric of towns and villages across the country. This is one more of the many unintended consequences of war. Beyond the the zinc coffins and the escalating drone onslaught, this is how war comes home.
Alexandra Sofonova, Igor’s sister, believes the state should give psychological support to men like her brother, but she is sure that it won’t. “He served his duty, he was wounded – he’s a man and they’re proud of things like this. And then he came back and turned out to be unnecessary, he couldn’t even get a passport, he goes to glue wallpaper. Maybe something clicked in his head”, she says.
On the back of a supermarket wall a few feet from where we sit there is a piece of graffiti scrawled in large black letters. “Putin, no to war,” it says. I ask Alexandra what she thinks about it.
“Putin, no to war”
“I don’t know what kind of special operation this is,” she says. “Many of my friends died and are returning in zinc coffins. But they are dying for nothing. What are we fighting to win?”
The other sister in this story, Irina Zhamoidina, whose men were murdered back home, says it is her faith in God which gets her through each painful day.
“I’m afraid for the whole country. No one has the right to kill another, to take a life. They were not given this right”, she says. “We must stop this somehow, so that these kind of people are not among normal society.”
For a long time, Rita Lifshitz would come back to Kibbutz Nir Oz every week, sit outside the house of her father-in-law, Oded, and have a drink.
To raise a glass to the people who had gone. To remember October 7.
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“We used to drink a beer every weekend,” she tells me, her eyes trained on the small little table on the patio where they would sit and talk.
“So for 500 days I came to have a beer outside the table. Here I put the beer for grandpa and I put the beer for me. He was my psychologist for 500 days.
“He was only a few kilometres from me and I just imagine him coming in with a big smile.”
Rita Lifshitz tells Sky News her kibbutz ‘wakes up every morning to the 7th of October’
Around her, the charred remains of violence, death, and devastation. The burnt-out wreckage of happy lives that came to a horrific end.
I spent two hours walking around this kibbutz with Rita. She showed me the places where friends had been murdered, where loved ones had been taken hostage, and where her best friend had been shot and then dragged away, his blood still smeared over the floor of his home.
“It is a trauma,” she says. “And all of us, the whole kibbutz, wakes up every morning to the 7th of October.”
On the morning of 7 October 2023, this small kibbutz, which sits within sight of the border with Gaza, was overrun by Hamas fighters.
In total, 117 people, more than a quarter of those who were there that morning, were either killed or kidnapped. No other kibbutz suffered such a high proportion of casualties.
Among them, Oded Lifshitz and his wife, Yocheved. Both were in their 80s, and both had volunteered for charities promoting peaceful relations with Gazans. Both were taken hostage on October 7.
Oded Lifshitz, who died in Hamas captivity
Oded used to drive sick children from Gaza and take them to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Now we stand in the charred remains of their home.
Yocheved was eventually released after 16 days as a hostage, but Oded died in captivity. His body was not returned until earlier this year, but he had probably died a year earlier.
And now we stand in the charred remains of their house.
To Rita, this place is both a touchstone to a happier time and also a stark warning of inhumanity. A panel of metal is all that is left of the piano that Oded loved to play.
The couple’s crockery is still scattered in a corner, thrown there when their furniture was upended.
“They started firing rockets at us at 6.30 in the morning, but we didn’t worry because they have been firing rockets at us for 20 years,” says Rita.
“There was one day we had 800 rockets land round here, so we are not scared of rockets. We didn’t get any information about what was happening, no warning.
“The first we knew was when two people working in the fields saw Hamas, and they were the first ones to be killed.”
It is believed that around 540 fighters attacked the kibbutz – far more than Nir Oz’s entire population. It was a massacre. Only six houses escaped attack.
The nursery school workshops, gardens – all of them shot, burnt, destroyed.
We move to the far end of the home, picking our way through the debris that still litters the floor.
There is a steel door, the entrance to the bomb shelter where Oded and Yocheved often slept and where they tried to hide.
Their beds are still here, blackened and burnt. In the door are bullet holes – Oded had done his best to hold the door shut, but he was shot in the hand and the attackers stormed in.
‘The death road’
The last time Yocheved saw her husband was him lying on the floor, bleeding. As she was taken away, rolled into a carpet, she didn’t know if he was dead or alive.
To walk around this kibbutz is to witness the scars of trauma again and again. A black flag outside a house means someone died there.
A yellow flag designates that an occupant was taken hostage. There is a road that Rita calls “the death road,” where almost every house has at least one flag outside.
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We go into the home of one friend, who was murdered in the living room. Her clothes are still there, her handbag hangs on the bedroom door. It feels so intrusive to be here, but Rita insists the world needs to see.
We see Natan, a long-term resident who is now 88 years old. His home was one of only six to escape being ransacked, because the Hamas attackers couldn’t work out how to get through the front door.
He says he came back as soon as he could, despite the destruction around him, insistent he is not fearful.
“This is my home,” he says emphatically.
Natan says his home was one of only six to escape being ransacked
Rita takes me to the home of her best friend, Itzhak Elgarat. Unlike most of the homes, his was not set ablaze, so it still looks now as it did then.
A bottle of olive oil is on the side, cooking ingredients laid out, a couple of bottles of wine set on the table.
But also bullet holes strewn across the walls, in the furniture. Possessions thrown around and, horrendously, Itzhak’s blood still smeared across the walls, the floor, and the door where he was shot.
The other side
I climb a set of stairs, which used to belong to a house that has now been demolished.
You can see Gaza in the near distance, across a few fields.
And over there, not so long ago, Sabah might have been looking back.
Just as Rita’s life has been torn apart by the war, so has Sabah’s. For Rita, it is the mental torment of what happened on October 7, the struggle to process and to move on.
Sabah says she has been displaced 13 times due to Israeli strikes since 7 October
For Sabah, it is something more fundamental. A Gazan displaced from Khan Younis, she once lived in a grand home near the border, only a couple of miles from Kibbutz Nir Oz, as the crow flies.
It was a home for multiple generations, the pride of her life, “a place meant to give us stability and peace”.
Since then, she has been displaced 13 times, and she worries that her home has been reduced to rubble.
“Personally, I long to go back to even the ruins of my house, to sit among the rubble, simply to be there,” she says.
“Even that would be better than this life. At least then I might find a little peace.”
The last time she saw her home, it had been hit by an explosion. Some of it was destroyed, but other parts were habitable.
But since then, Sabah has been told that it has been damaged by both fire and military action – news that devastated her.
A building in Gaza in ruins after an Israeli strike
She says: “Someone told me ‘your house was the very first thing they burned. The fire raged inside for three days. And after they burned it, they brought in an armoured vehicle and blew it up’.
“Just imagine losing your home. When they told me what happened to mine, I spent nearly ten days doing nothing but crying.
“It feels like your soul is torn away. Your spirit leaves you.”
‘We are an oppressed people,’ Sabah tells Sky News
She insists that this story is not just about October 7, not just about Hamas, but about decades of struggle that led to this point, about Palestinian anger and accusations that they are oppressed by Israel.
“This goes back generations. What happened on October 7 was not the beginning of the story. I remember my father, my grandfather, and their fathers before them telling what they had endured. We have lived our entire lives under this weight.
“This land is ours, our homeland. We did not buy it. It has been passed down from our ancestors, generation to generation. That is why it is not easy for me, or for any of us, to surrender it.
“The truth is that we are exhausted. We are an oppressed people. October 7 was just one day, but for us, it has felt like living through hundreds of October 7th’s, over and over again.”
It is hard to remember the Middle East before October 7 2023, so much has changed in the wake of its horrendous events.
Before the attack, the region’s geopolitical tectonic plates were grinding, but an uneasy status quo held sway and observed certain rules.
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But that day unleashed an earthquake, changing everything.
In two years of turmoil since, the region’s rulebook has been torn to pieces.
The first rule: Israel would manage the threat from Hamas but not try to eradicate it. Israel’s policy of dividing and ruling the Palestinians’ rival factions had come back to bite them.
Instead, Israelis insisted in one voice after October 7 no more “mowing the grass”, their euphemism for cutting Hamas down to size, from time to time. This time, the job must be finished.
That would change the way Israelis waged their war in Gaza. Not least in the way they would tolerate many more civilians dying, in the name of defeating their enemy. If the target’s rank was high enough, the deaths of scores of civilians – women and children – would be acceptable.
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Two years on from 7 October attacks
The outcome has been an unprecedentedly high civilian death toll.
Israel’s war on Hamas has now killed more than 67,000 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians or combatants.
Its impact will be felt for generations to come, not least no doubt on the potential radicalisation of those who have survived.
And it has seen Israel, a nation conceived in the wake of one genocide, accused of perpetrating another. That stain, justified or not, has implications for Israel’s psyche and own sense of identity.
Israel denies all accusations of genocide. But it has potentially grave repercussions for its future.
Abroad, popular support for Israel has fallen most of all among the young and most of all where it needs it most: America. The rule that supporting Israel will always be a vote-winner in the US is also now in question.
But the rules have changed Israel’s borders and in the way it has chosen to wield its increasingly hegemonic military power even more dramatically.
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Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel is now finding itself increasingly isolated. Pic: AP
Israel’s leaders found a new boldness in the wake of October 7, at the same time as technological and tactical advances gave them the tools to pursue it.
The pager operation against Hezbollah that crippled the Shiite Lebanese militia was planned long before October 7. But it reached operational utility just as Israel found the risk appetite to implement it.
It was decisive in the events that led to the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Since 2006 and Israel’s last war with Hezbollah, the rule held that neither would risk provoking another. It would be too devastating for both.
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The pager attack disabled Hezbollah’s ability to launch tens of thousands of missiles, after months of attritive attacks on them by Israel.
For as long as Hezbollah held that arsenal of missiles, it was assumed Israel would not risk attacking Iran. With that neutralised, Israel could now take on its ultimate enemies there.
The rules were rewritten in the skies over Iran and Israel in their first direct attacks on each other in April and October last year. Then, in June this year, Israel unleashed a devastating 12-day war on Iran, joined in its closing stages by US warplanes too.
But after reaching that zenith in military supremacy, Israel has since overreached. A failed airstrike on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, provoked the anger of allies, most crucially Donald Trump.
Netanyahu has provoked Trump in the past with Israel’s military offensives. Pic: Reuters
In the prelude to this anniversary, Benjamin Netanyahu is learning the limits of what can be achieved by military power alone. Having invested more in military action than constructive diplomacy, Netanyahu’s Israel is now increasingly isolated.
Israel’s leader finds himself hemmed in by a US president being leant on by Arab allies. Trump will not tolerate Israel annexing the West Bank and wants a deal that offers a “credible pathway” to a future Palestinian state.
Netanyahu needs to show he can still bring the remaining hostages home, that fighting the war this long was justified, and he has a plan for what happens the day after.
And if the war is being drawn to a close, with American mediation and the support of Arab partners and allies, they all have responsibilities too.
To find a better new status quo with far better rules, to make sure the carnage and regionwide turmoil of the last two years can be brought to a close and never repeated.
More than 200 people left stranded by a blizzard near the eastern face of Mount Everest are being evacuated, Reuters news agency reports.
It comes after some 350 trekkers were guided to safety during an initial rescue operation, which was launched after unusually heavy snowfall and rain struck the Himalayas on Friday and Saturday.
A source with knowledge of the situation told Reuters the evacuation should be completed on Tuesday, though the Tibetan regional government did not have an immediate comment.
Those rescued so far have been escorted to the small town of Qudang, which is about 30 miles from base camp on Everest’s Tibetan side.
Tibetan firefighters rescue trekkers from Everest. Pic: Reuters
October is a popular time for hikers attempting to climb Everest – the highest mountain on Earth.
Skies are usually clear following the end of the Indian monsoon season, making the weekend’s rainfall unusual.
Chen Geshuang, who was part of an 18-strong team that safely got to Qudang, said: “It was so wet and cold in the mountains, and hypothermia was a real risk.
“The weather this year is not normal. The guide said he had never encountered such weather in October. And it happened all too suddenly.”
Read more from Sky News:
Two lives torn apart by October 7
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Eric Wen, another trekker who survived the ordeal, said: “It was raining and snowing every day, and we did not see Everest at all.”
Recent days have been particularly busy around the Karma valley leading to Everest’s eastern face, Kangshung, spurred by a national holiday in China.
The valley is a relatively pristine part of the region, boasting lush vegetation and untouched alpine forests.
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