The Ryazan District Court sentenced the accused Alexei Poltavets in absentia to nine and a half years in prison for the murder of 21-year-old Artem Dorofeyev and complicity in the murder of 19-year-old Ekaterina Levchenko in 2017. The mother of the murdered woman, Tatyana Levchenko, reported this to Mediazona on March 20.
The trial has been held behind closed doors since November 2025. The decision was made on February 10, but was not announced in advance.
Where Poltavets is now is unknown.
In 2020, Alexei Poltavets told Meduza about the murder of mutual acquaintances involved in the network case, Artem Dorofeev and Ekaterina Levchenko. He admitted that he killed Dorofeev, and another defendant in the network case, Maxim Ivankin, killed Levchenko. Poltavets claimed that they acted on the orders of another person involved in the case, Dmitry Pchelintsev.
The first accused in the murder of Dorofeev and Levchenko was Ivankin, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison. He said that he wrote a confession under torture and refused to confess.