The First Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction reduced Maxim Ivankin’s sentence in the case of a double murder near Ryazan — from 18 years to 17 years in a maximum security colony. The lawyer for the family of deceased Ekaterina Levchenko, Alexey Mikhalchik, told NeMoskva and Baza about this.
Taking into account the verdict in the Network case, Ivankin’s total sentence was reduced from 24 years to 23 years.
According to the court's website, judge Pavel Melekhin changed the classification of the case. As lawyer Mikhalchik clarified, he considered Ivankin’s accusations of murdering Artem Dorofeev unproven.
“The court did not see evidence of a preliminary conspiracy between Ivankin and Poltavets, who admitted to Meduza journalists in the murder of Dorofeev. That is, now, according to the meaning of the sentence, Ivankin and Poltavets killed the young couple at the same time, in the same place, but each acted autonomously,” the lawyer added.
Ivankin’s defense attorney, Konstantin Kartashov, said that he would give a more detailed comment only after receiving the reasons for the verdict. “Ivankin was not involved in the murder of Dorofeev at all,” he recounted the outcome of the meeting.
Murder in the Ryazan forest. The jury found Maxim Ivankin from the Network case guilty — this is how the prosecution proved his involvement
In January, a jury unanimously found Ivankin guilty of murdering two acquaintances. According to investigators, in April 2017, Ivankin and his friend Alexey Poltavets killed 19-year-old Ekaterina Levchenko and 21-year-old Artem Dorofeev after the four of them fled Penza, fearing persecution for drug trafficking. The Poltava resident is not on trial; he left Russia in 2017.
The prosecution believes that Dorofeev and Levchenko could have betrayed their accomplices: the couple was not ready for life on the run and spoke about their desire to surrender to the police. The security forces believe that upon learning of this, Poltavets and Ivankin lured Levchenko and Dorofeev into the forest and killed them there. The case began to be investigated in February 2020, when Meduza published the confession of Alexey Poltavets. The publication appeared 11 days after the verdict in the case of the “terrorist community “Network”” in Penza, according to which Ivankin was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Maxim Ivankin himself completely denies his involvement in the murders and insists that his confession was extracted under torture.