A resident of Severodvinsk, Artem Lavrentyev, who was convicted in 2022 in the case of the murder of the cat Kuzi, died in the war in Ukraine. This was reported on the page of the initiative group “In Memory of the Cat Kuzi from Severodvinsk,” which was created by animal rights activist from St. Petersburg Elena Kiriltsova.
“From the colony I asked for the SVO. He went missing in the summer and was only found now. In January-February, what remains of him, unburied for several months, will be brought to his mother in Severodvinsk, in a closed coffin,” the group’s publication says. Kiriltsova writes that information about Lavrentyev’s death was received “through the military registration and enlistment office.”
In the fall of 2021, Lavrentiev, together with his girlfriend Anna-Victoria Gromovich, kidnapped a 14-year-old cat from his mother. The couple tortured Kuzya for a week: they squeezed the cat into a fist, burned him, hit him on the nose with a bottle, pulled out his whiskers and intimidated him. Lavrentyev and Gromovich posted videos of torture on social networks. When Kuzya died, his body was returned to the owner.
Public “We live here! Arkhangelsk” published screenshots of Gromovich’s messages in which she said that she tortured the cat to spite the mother of her partner.
A criminal case was opened against Lavrentyev and Gromovich for cruelty to animals (Article 245 of the Criminal Code). Initially, both were ordered to prohibit certain actions as a preventive measure. In response to this, animal rights activists in different cities began to picket and collect signatures demanding that the couple be punished “to the fullest extent of the law.”
In February 2022, the Severodvinsk City Court sentenced Gromovich to three years and two months in a penal colony, and Lavrentyev to three years and six months in a general regime colony. Both were deprived of parental rights.
Last November, at the animal cemetery in the Krasnogvardeisky district of St. Petersburg, animal activists Elena Kiriltsova and Irina Makarova erected a monument to the cat Kuza.