A military court in Chechnya sentenced a conscript in a bribery case.

Pavel Kotelnikov, a mobilized soldier from a military unit in Chechnya, was found guilty of acting as an intermediary in bribery. He transferred money from fellow soldiers to a staff officer for a transfer to a unit farther from the front—a transfer the recipient of the bribes did not have the authority to do.

The details of the case are known from the appellate ruling of the Southern District Court. It was considering an appeal against Kotelnikov's sentence of seven years in prison, handed down by a military court in Grozny. The mobilized soldier was tried on four counts: he transferred one million rubles each from three servicemen, and another 1,075,000 from a fourth. The latter amount turned out to be a sham—Kotelnikov was detained after receiving the bribe.

The court's decision states that the mobilized soldier made each of the offers on the officer's instructions. The defense drew attention to this when challenging the verdict: the bribe-taker's actions were classified as fraud, but the court failed to acknowledge the fact that he was Kotelnikov's superior and "effectively provoked" him to commit the crime, the lawyer noted. This argument was rejected.

The court took into account the soldier's participation in the military operation against Ukraine, his Suvorov medal, and his two children, but still upheld the verdict.