A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced a Ukrainian man to 25 years in prison for the murder of an army recruitment officer and former submarine commander.
The convicted man, Sergei Denysenko, was arrested in July last year, two days after the killing of recruitment official Stanislav Rzhitsky, who was shot dead while jogging in a park in the southern city of Krasnodar.
A court in Krasnodar found Denysenko guilty of murder and treason, saying he had joined an “organized group” whose leadership assigned him to kill Rzhitsky “over his activities in service,” according to Russia’s Investigative Committee.
Denysenko was ordered to serve five years in prison and the rest of the sentence in a strict-regime penal colony. He was also ordered to pay five million rubles ($51,000) in compensation to the dead man’s father.
A video released by the court showed Denysenko with white cropped hair and beard shaking his head and shrugging as the sentence was read.
Rzhitsky worked as the deputy to the Krasnodar city administration official in charge of mobilization operations for the army. Previously, he was commander of the Krasnodar submarine.
Investigators said Denysenko learned the Rzhitsky’s jogging routine and then laid in wait for him in a wooded area of the park in the early morning. Rzhitsky was shot at least eight times.
Denysenko, a qualified karate trainer, is Ukrainian and gained Russian citizenship a few months before the murder.
Ukrainian media linked Rzhitsky’s murder to his role as a submarine commander in the Black Sea Fleet, reporting that the Krasnodar submarine took part in missile strikes on the city of Vinnytsia in July 2022, killing around 27 people.
The Kommersant business daily reported that Rzhitsky had left his submarine post in 2021.
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