How many people did Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko snipe?
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko (; 12 July 191610 October 1974) was a Soviet sniper in the Red Army during World War II, credited with 309 kills. She is regarded as one of the top military snipers of all time and the most successful female sniper in history.
Zinaida Tusnolobova-Marchenko
Zinaida Tusnolobova-Marchenko () was a Senior Medical NCO of the Red Army medical service in the 849th Rifle Regiment during World War II. After being attacked by a German soldier in Kursk and suffering from severe frostbite she became a quadruple amputee. With her injuries forcing her to retire from the military she spoke on the radio and wrote an open letter to the soldiers of the 1st Baltic Front which received over 3,000 replies. She was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union on 6 December 1957 and the Florence Nightingale Medal in 1965, making her the third Soviet woman to receive the medal from the Red Cross.
Anatoly Slivko
In 1989, he was asked by the police to help arrest a then-unidentified serial killer of Rostov Oblast who had killed a minimum of 29 victims by the time of this interview. Although Slivko did provide some insight into how offenders such as himself were able to function, much of the actual advice he provided to police would prove to be incorrect. The then-unidentified serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, was arrested in 1990 and would be convicted of killing 52 women and children.
Igor Strelkov (officer)
On 10 July 2014, news outlet Mashable reported finding execution orders three days earlier for Slavov and Lukyanov in Girkin's abandoned Sloviansk headquarters. The orders were signed "Strelkov" with the name Girkin Igor Vsevolodovich printed underneath. Also sentenced to death was Alexei Pichko, a civilian who was caught stealing two shirts and a pair of pants from an abandoned house of his neighbour; according to an unconfirmed story, his body "had been dumped on the front lines" after he was executed. On 24 July, Ukrainian authorities exhumed several corpses from a mass grave site on the grounds of a children's hospital near the Jewish cemetery in Slovyansk, which might contain as many as 20 bodies of those executed by order of "Strelkov". Among the identified victims were four Ukrainian Protestants who the police and locals said have been kidnapped on 8 June after attending a service at their church, falsely accused of helping the Ukrainian Army, robbed for their cars, and shot the following day.
Maria Spiridonova
Spiridonova's target was , a landowner and Tambov provincial councilor who had been appointed district security chief in Borisoglebsk, a town southeast of Tambov. Luzhenovsky was known for his harsh suppression of peasant unrest in the district, and the SR committee in Tambov "passed a death sentence on him". Spiridonova volunteered to kill him. She stalked Luzhenovsky for several days, and finally got her chance at the Borisoglebsk railway station on 16 January 1906. She fired several shots from a revolver, and hit Luzhenovsky five times. He died on 10 February.
Spiridonova was immediately captured by Luzhenovsky's Cossack bodyguards, and taken to Tambov the next day.
Natalya Kovshova
In January 1942, Kovshova and Polivanova, who had joined the same regiment shortly after Kovshova, began fighting the German forces on the Northwestern Front. Both women established themselves as the Regiment's resident snipers. Kovshova was the shooter in the two-women sniper team, and Polivanova acted as the spotter. They both fought in the Battle of Moscow when the 528th Rifle Regiment were sent to help defend Russia's capital. During the battle, Kovshova proved to be an expert sniper, killing many German soldiers. She also dug numerous anti-tank emplacements, machine gun nests, and infantry trenches during the defence. She took the job of training new soldiers how to use the rifles. She also trained the best students to become snipers, teaching them marksmanship early; passing on her shooting skills. For her actions in the battle of Moscow, Kovshova was awarded the Order of the Red Star.
History of the Jews in Ukraine
According to the "pinqasim" record books the murdered in the pogrom included 390 men, 309 women and 76 children. The number of wounded exceeded 500. Two weeks later the Order 131 was published in the central newspaper by the head of Directorate of Ukraine. In it Symon Petliura denounced such actions and eventually executed otaman Semesenko by firing-squad in November 1919. The Semesenko's brigade was disarmed and dissolved. This event is especially remarkable for being used to justify Schwartzbard for assassination of the Ukrainian leader in 1926. Although no facts of Petliura's direct involvement was ever proven, Schwartzbard was acquitted in light of revenge. The series of Jewish pogroms in various places around Ukraine culminated in the Kiev pogroms of 1919 between June and October of that year.
Alexander Spesivtsev
Spesivtsev, with the assistance of his mother Lyudmila, targeted street children and young women across Novokuznetsk by luring them into their apartment, where they would be tortured and killed, and sometimes cannibalized. Despite only being convicted for 4 murders, Spesivtsev confessed to 19 murders that he was accused of by police, and based on evidence is believed to have committed over 80 killings as early as 1991.
Hristo Georgiev (serial killer)
The operation wasn't completely fruitless however, as it lead to the investigation of 17 persons with criminal backgrounds, 25 mentally ill, 8 relatives of Hristov and 9 suspects. Eventually, 13 instances of domestic violence and two acts of hooliganism were discovered.
On October 10, 1979, on "General Liprandi" Street in Sofia's "Hadzhi Dimitar" District, the body of 19-year-old Tsvetanka Stancheva was found. She had been killed with a sharp object. A man, who was collecting bricks from a nearby abandoned building, had discovered the grisly scene. The interesting in this case is that the victim was infected with syphilis, which lead the investigators to interrogate all the registered people suffering from the same disease, who had not revealed the source of how they got it. Taking into account Tsvetanka's life, the theory of one of her suitors killing her was considered, as well as that of a psychopath. The case was then nicknamed "The Provincialist".
Maria Petrova (spree killer)
On March 1, 2002, Petrova killed 20-year-old Sergei Makariev by stabbing him twice with a knife. Subsequently, she explained that he harassed her, but no witnesses confirmed this. The murder took place at the bus stop of the Shalom Theater, near Varshavskaya Metro Station. On March 27, Petrova killed a 60-year-old pensioner, Nikolai Zhabin, by cutting his throat. Subsequently, Petrova committed three more attempted murders (all victims survived), and was suspected of another attack, but was not charged due to lack of evidence. All attacks were carried out in the same way - stab wounds to the peritoneum and neck.
Nina Raspopova
She participated in the bombing campaigns over the Caucasus, Belorussia, Ukraine, Crimea, Germany, and Poland. In total she completed 805 sorties, sometimes making as many as eight sorties in one night. In doing so, she dropped a total of 110 tons of bombs on her targets, which included destroying three ferries, one segment of railroad, a searchlight, an ammunition depot, six military vehicles, and repulsing three artillery battalions.
Indigenous peoples of Siberia
In Kamchatka the Itelmens' uprisings against Russian rule in 1706, 1731, and 1741, were crushed. During the first uprising the Itelmen were armed with only stone weapons, but in later uprisings they used gunpowder weapons. The Russian Cossacks faced tougher resistance from the Koryaks, who revolted with bows and guns from 1745 to 1756, and were even forced to give up in their attempts to wipe out the Chukchi in 1729, 1730-1, and 1744-7. After the Russian defeat in 1729 at Chukchi hands, the Russian commander Major Pavlutskiy was responsible for the Russian war against the Chukchi and the mass slaughters and enslavement of Chukchi women and children in 1730-31, but his cruelty only made the Chukchis fight more fiercely. A war against the Chukchis and Koryaks was ordered by Empress Elizabeth in 1742 to totally expel them from their native lands and erase their culture through war. The command was that the natives be "totally extirpated" with Pavlutskiy leading again in this war from 1744-47 in which he led to the Cossacks "with the help of Almighty God and to the good fortune of Her Imperial Highness", to slaughter the Chukchi men and enslave their women and children as booty. However this phase of the war came to an inconclusive end, when the Chukchi forced them to give up by killing Pavlutskiy and decapitating him.
Maksim Gelman stabbing spree
Four people were killed during the stabbing spree, and an additional five others were wounded.
On February 13, 2011, Gelman was arraigned in a Brooklyn courtroom on charges of murder and assault, where he was represented by public defender Michael Baum. While being led from the police precinct to the courthouse, in front of a crowd of onlookers and reporters, Gelman reportedly showed no remorse, saying that he had been "set up." Although no motive for the murders has been yet offered by the authorities, it has been speculated in the media that the rampage was triggered by Gelman's advances being scorned by Yelena Bulchenko. On November 30, 2011, Gelman pleaded guilty to all charges.
Oleg Slabynko
Oleg Slabynko was shot dead by two unidentified individuals in his own apartment in Moscow on 25 January 1996 at 10:30pm. The apartment was located on Klinskaya Ulitsa. Before Slablynko was attacked at his front door, his assassins called his apartment to make sure he was there. The gunmen approached his apartment and shot Slabynko four times at close range with a 9mm gun, according to Moscow Police. Slabynko was known to air hard hitting, abrasive news and Moscow in the 1990s was not the safest place for journalists. An unidentified group was contracted to kill leaders and people of influence in Moscow. Over a twenty-year period, 562 Russian officials were murdered.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov
On 8 June 1998, Larisa Yudina, a publisher of an opposition newspaper, was stabbed to death in Elista. Both people convicted in the murder were Kalmykian government aides, and one was an advisor to Ilyumzhinov. One other person was acquitted by offering evidence to help in the conviction. Ilyumzhinov denied any involvement with the murder; the incident was investigated by the local and the Russian authorities. On October 24, 2010 Ilyumzhinov retired as Head of Kalmykia, being replaced by Alexey Orlov. On 12 June 2011, Ilyumzhinov appeared in public in Tripoli alongside the then-embattled, since overthrown and executed, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, after having played a game of chess with him.
Siege of Sloviansk
On 5 May, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that Ukrainian soldiers were killed in fighting with pro-Russian separatists on the outskirts of the city, and said the separatists, numbering as many as 800, fired "large-caliber weapons," and "used mortars and other equipment." Four Ukrainian soldiers were killed and twenty more were wounded in fighting. He claimed 30 "terrorists" were killed, and dozens wounded. Strelkov, Donbass Militia leader, told the Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti that "We lost around 10, including peaceful residents, and 20–25 were wounded." According to a statement on the Interior Ministry's website, separatists used unarmed civilians as human shields as they attacked Ukrainian troops and set fire to nearby buildings, and fired at a minibus that was carrying wounded people from the battlefield, killing an officer in a special police unit who was escorting it. Pro-Russian insurgents also shot down a Ukrainian M-24 helicopter in Sloviansk using a heavy machine gun.
Hoddle Street massacre
The first shot that Knight had fired into the car had slightly wounded Renata, and the second shot he fired had seriously wounded Danny Coldebella. As Collyvas's car was reversing a motorcycle being ridden by Wayne Timms and Jayne Timbury, followed by a car containing Alexandra Stamatopoulos, Steven Stamatopoulos, Irene Fountis, Vicki Fountis and Panagioti Fountis, drove into the ambush zone and stopped opposite Collyvas's car. At this point Knight, who was surrounded by at least 40 armed police officers, decided to withdraw from the area and began "hunting" police officers. It was just after 9.45pm and he'd expended 40 rounds of .22 calibre bullets, 25 rounds of 12-gauge buckshot and 32 rounds of 7.62mm calibre bullets in the preceding 15 minutes. Five people lay dead, two were fatally wounded and a further 17 had been wounded. In addition to the expended ammunition, Knight had lost his "suicide" bullet and another 7.62mm bullet as he had moved up the nature-strip. Knight had also lost his knife on the nature-strip. He only had his M14 rifle and 17 rounds of ammunition, having discarded the other two firearms.
Massacre of Novgorod
Ivan's terrible ‘vengeance’ left Novgorod severely wounded. The death toll of the massacre is uncertain. According to the "Third Novgorod Chronicle", the massacre lasted for five weeks. The "First Pskov Chronicle" gives the number of victims as 60,000. These numbers are debated, however, and are not from an impartial source. Western sources from the time give figures ranging from 2,700 to 27,000 killed. Modern researchers estimate the number of victims in a range from 2,500 up to 12,000. Ruslan Skrynnikov, reconstructing the sinodiki (prayer lists) of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, found only 1,505 named victims of the massacre, although these were most likely elite citizens and lesser citizens were not listed. Based on these lists, Skrynnikov considers that the number of victims was 2,000 to 3,000. As the author of "Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny)", R.G. Skrynnikov stated, "the sack of Novgorod is the most repulsive episode in the brutal history of the oprichnina. The cruel, senseless slaughter of innocent people made oprichnina synonymous with lawlessness and excess."
Odessa
Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the famous female sniper, took part in the battle for Odessa. Her first two kills were effected near Belyayevka using a Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle with a P.E. 4-power scope. She recorded 187 confirmed kills during defense of Odessa. Pavlichenko's confirmed kills during World War II totalled 309 (including 36 enemy snipers).
Alexander Labutkin
The investigation into the Labutkin case was short-lived, as Labutkin himself confessed to committing 12 murders. In addition to Maria Labutkina, several others were also arrested on suspicion of concealing the killer's crimes. In the summer of 1935, a trial was held, during which the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced Labutkin to death, while the remaining defendants got long term prison sentences. Soon after, Labutkin was executed by firing squad.
Ukrainian Insurgent Army
Mass arrests of suspected UPA informants or family members were conducted; between February 1944 and May 1946 over 250,000 people were arrested in Western Ukraine. Those arrested typically experienced beatings or other violence. Those suspected of being UPA members underwent torture; (reports exist of some prisoners being burned alive). The many arrested women believed to be affiliating with the UPA were subjected to torture, deprivation, and rape at the hands of Soviet security in order to "break" them and get them to reveal UPA members' identities and locations or to turn them into Soviet double-agents. Mutilated corpses of captured rebels were put on public display. Ultimately, between 1944 and 1952 as many as 600,000 people may have been arrested in Western Ukraine, with about one third executed and the rest imprisoned or exiled.
The UPA responded to the Soviet methods by unleashing their own terror against Soviet activists, suspected collaborators and their families. This work was particularly attributed to the Sluzhba Bezbeky (SB), the anti-espionage wing of the UPA. In a typical incident in Lviv region, in front of horrified villagers, UPA troops gouged out the eyes of two entire families suspected of reporting on insurgent movements to Soviet authorities, before hacking their bodies to pieces. Due to public outrage concerning these violent punitive acts, the UPA stopped the practice of killing the families of collaborators by mid-1945. Other victims of the UPA included Soviet activists sent to Galicia from other parts of the Soviet Union; heads of village Soviets, those sheltering or feeding Red Army personnel, and even people turning food in to collective farms. The effect of such terrorist acts was such that people refused to take posts as village heads, and until the late 1940s villages chose single men with no dependants as their leaders.
Kubrat Pulev
Despite making a spirited effort, Pulev suffered three knockdowns en route to being knocked out in round five by a devastating left hook. The time of stoppage was recorded as 2:11 of round 5.In the post-fight, Pulev said, "Wladimir is a really good opponent, but he was lucky. I want a rematch". Klitschko praised Pulev, calling him a tough competitor. CompuBox stats showed that Klitschko landed 38 of 89 punches thrown (43%), this included 47% of his power punches. Pulev managed to land only 25 of his 110 thrown (23%). This was made up of 10 jabs and 15 power shots landed. The fight drew 10.5 million viewers in Germany and 1.8 million viewers in Bulgaria (becoming the most watched sports event on the Bulgarian TV since 2007). The fight also averaged 620,000 viewers on HBO and peaked at 700,000 viewers. Overall, the event had an estimated audience of 300 million viewers worldwide.
Vasily Smirnov (serial killer)
On September 3, 1979, on the bank of the Izhora River, the body of 8-year-old Marina Koshkina was found. She had been brutally murdered, and raped before her death. A nail was found hammered in her head. Smirnov had attacked and raped the victim, after which he demanded that she not tell her mother. The girl refused, and he then proceeded to slaughter her. The investigation into this case was very active, but they couldn't catch the killer. Soon the corpse of a small boy named Andrei Lopatin was found at the Silver Lake. He had been raped and then stabbed. Smirnov wanted to cut off a piece from the boy's body and use it for food, but a passing bicyclist frightened him off. Horrifying rumors of a vampire who has been drinking blood from children quickly arose in Gatchina.
Sergey Sergeev (spree killer)
Sergeev then moved to Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. He wounded a farm manager in the Synelnykove Raion (district) and stole 650 rubles from the farm's collective fund, then hid out in the steppe and local villages. On July 9, 1987, Sergeev returned to Zaporozhia, bursting into an apartment on Paramanov Street, and inflicting heavy wounds on 9-year-old Lena Novikova. On July 10th he broke into an apartment on Gorky Street and killed 84-year-old Alla Boyko. On July 12, he attacked two teenagers with a knife while they were bathing in a pond near a village in the Prymorsk Raion, but both of them survived.
Nina Petrova
While fighting on the 2nd Belorussian Front in the battle for the control of Elbing in February 1945 she provided cover to her unit by attacking enemy positions with sniper fire, killing 32 enemy soldiers in that engagement and bringing her kill tally to 100 with her victories in Leningrad, Lepassaare, and other battles. For her actions in Elbing she was nominated to be awarded the Order of Glory 1st Class but did not live to receive it. She was killed in action on 1 May 1945, just days before the end of the war, when a mortar attack pushed her off a cliff. Throughout her career she trained 512 other snipers, killed 122 enemy soldiers, and took three enemy combatants hostage.
Lillelid murders
Delfina Lillelid was shot eight times, and all eight bullets were recovered six were from a 9mm and two were from a .25 caliber. The first of these shots fired by a 9mm shattered the bone in her left arm, and the second shot, also from a 9mm, shattered the thigh of her left leg. Dr. Blake testified that these shots would not have produced her death, but would have caused severe pain and the victim would not have been able to stand. Mrs. Lillelid was shot six additional times while on her back, with the first three shots striking the left side of her abdomen.
It was Dr. Blake's opinion that these shots were fired to form a triangular pattern,
similar to the injuries inflicted on Mr. Lillelid. The three shots pierced her stomach,
leaving a four to five inch tear, and traveled through her pancreas, spleen, left
kidney, and left adrenal. A final 9mm entry wound was located at the mid-section of
Mrs. Lillelid's abdomen just above her navel and was recovered from her spine.
There was a .25 caliber gunshot wound under her left armpit, where the bullet lodged in the
skin on the back of her left shoulder. Another shot caused a wound to
Mrs. Lillelid's left side, and the bullet was recovered from the center of her liver. She
also suffered abrasions on her right calf. Mrs. Lillelid's wounds were not immediately fatal, and that she could have been conscious for as long as 25 minutes, including when her body was driven over by the van.
Lucy Dudko
Lucy Dudko (Lyudmila Vitalievna Dudko, née Zhdanova; ) is a Russian-Australian woman convicted of hijacking a helicopter in 1999, which she used in the escape from Silverwater Jail of convicted armed robber John Killick. Dudko served time in the Mulawa Women's Prison from 1999 to 2006 before being released on parole.
Dmitry Pavlutsky
On 12 March 1747, a party of 500 Chukchi warriors raided the Russian stockade of Anadyrsk. Pavlutsky's regiment of 131 men, consisting of 96 Cossacks and 35 Koryak allies, set off in pursuit, catching up with the Chuchki near the settlement of Markovo. Pavlutsky ordered an attack despite lacking reinforcements, and his outnumbered regiment was defeated in a battle reminiscent of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Pavlutsky, wearing iron chain mail armor, was able to escape the field unhurt but was surrounded on a small nearby hill (now called Major's Hill) and killed. His head was reportedly cut off and kept by the Chukchi for years afterward. Pavlutsky's body is buried in Yakutsk.
Yekaterina Mikhailova-Demina
Four months later, in December 1944, her unit had advanced to Yugoslavia. During an attack on the fortress of Ilok in Croatia, she was one of 50 marines who carried out a diversionary attack from a small island in the Danube below the fortress. The unit had to use trees as firing positions as the island was flooded. In the firefight that followed, Mikhailova-Demina was shot through the hand. Only 13 of her unit survived the intense gun battle and all were wounded. Some of the casualties fell out of their trees and into the freezing water but were saved by Mikhailova-Demina, who jumped in and used belts and rifle slings to tie the wounded men to the trees. Seven men were saved by her. The battle left her with double pneumonia in addition to the wound to her hand and required her to be hospitalized. Despite this, she left the hospital early without authorization and returned to her unit. She was awarded a second Order of the Red Banner for her heroism.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Pavlichenko's story was featured in the fourth season of Drunk History in which she was played by Mae Whitman.
Irina Gaidamachuk
In 2010 Gaidamachuk attempted to kill another elderly woman, who managed to escape. The potential victim reported to the police that the killer had just attacked her and that they were female, which proved to be a vital clue as the police had assumed the killer was male. Gaidamachuk killed her final victim, Alexandra Povaritsyna, whose neighbor had seen her leave around the time of the murder. After the police received the information from Povaritsyna's neighbor, they arrested Gaidamachuk who quickly confessed to the killings. Another woman who had been initially suspected for the crimes, and after pressure from authorities, confessed to the murders. Gaidamachuk stated that she committed the murder-robberies to pay for vodka to feed her alcohol addiction, as her husband refused to give her money for it.
Lydia Litvyak
There are conflicting claims about Litvyak's victory score in different publications; none are official records. Most often, 11 individual kills and 3 team kills are quoted, but also eight individual and four team, 12 individual and two team, or other combinations. Pasportnikova stated in 1990 that the tally was 12 solo kills including the balloon, and three shared. Polunina has written that the kills of top-scoring Soviet pilots, including those of Litvyak and Budanova, were often inflated; and that Litvyak should be credited with five solo aircraft kills and two group kills, including the observation balloon.
Sergei Ryakhovsky
In 1988, Ryakhovsky committed his first murder when he killed a homosexual man in Bitsa, a village in Moscow Oblast on the outskirts of Moscow. The same year he killed three homosexual men in Izmailovski Park, which Ryakhovsky claimed was part of his personal mission to "cleanse" society by killing homosexuals and prostitutes. Despite this, the majority of his victims between 1988 and 1993 were elderly women, although he also killed five men and two teenagers. Ryakhovsky's main methods of killing were stabbing or strangulation with his bare hands or a rope, and after the victim had died he mutilated the bodies, mainly in the genital area. Some corpses of Ryakhovsky's victims would have sexual acts performed upon them. In January 1993, Ryakhovsky murdered a 78-year-old man, cut off his head with a hunting knife and, one day later, returned to cut off his leg. His next victim, a 65-year-old woman, had her abdomen ruptured with a weak pyrotechnical device. He hanged, eviscerated, and then decapitated his penultimate victim, a 16-year-old boy, with a knife.
Semen Semenchenko
On the morning May 23, 2014 the battalion fell into an ambush of Russian terrorists in the village of Karlivka Mariyinsky district. Part of militaries managed to escape the entrapment and reach a checkpoint of the Ukrainian militaries close to the town of Krasnoarmiysk. 5 people were killed. As aresult of fights almost half of all the combatants had got wounds of varying severity. During the fight at least 15 terrorists were destroyed. The Donbas battalion lost 5 militaries, 7 were wounded.
Mikhail Popkov
Two years later, Popkov confessed to 59 additional killings, a total victim count which surpasses those of Russian serial killers Andrei Chikatilo and Alexander Pichushkin. On December 10, 2018, after a trial in the regional court of Irkutsk in Siberia, he was convicted of 56 further murders; the three other alleged killings could not be confirmed. He was given a second life sentence.
Andrei Chikatilo
In 1987 Chikatilo killed three times. On each occasion the murder took place while he was on a business trip far away from the Rostov Oblast, and none of these murders were linked to the manhunt in Rostov. Chikatilo's first murder in 1987 was committed on 16 May, when he encountered a 12-year-old boy, named Oleg Makarenkov, at a train station in the Urals town of Revda. Makarenkov was lured from the station with the promise of sharing a meal with Chikatilo at his dacha; he was murdered in woodland close to the station, although his remains would remain undiscovered until 1991. In July, he killed a 12-year-old boy, named Ivan Bilovetsky, in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia, and on 15 September, he killed a 16-year-old vocational school student, named Yuri Tereshonok, in woodland on the outskirts of Leningrad.
Killing of Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin
After the event, the Russian prosecutors charged Ukrainian Army aviation helicopter pilot Nadiya Savchenko (sometimes transliterated as Nadezhda) for assisting in the deaths of Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin. Despite having an alibi (she was captured by the rebels one hour before the mortar attack occurred according to billing data of mobile phones), she is accused of informing Ukrainian Forces of the location of the journalists. A guilty verdict was delivered 20 March 2016, and she was sentenced the next day to 22 years. On 25 May 2016, the Ukrainian and Russian governments exchanged prisoners, and Savchenko was released and flown to Kiev while two Russian prisoners held in Ukrainian prison were released to Russia.
List of Worldwar characters
Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova: One of many female pilots in the Soviet Union's Red Air Force. Stationed at an airfield near Kharkiv in the Ukraine when the invasion begins, Ludmila witnesses the destruction of most human aircraft, both Soviet and German, at the hands of the alien invaders. She flies a Polikarpov Po-2, a small wooden biplane with a low ceiling. Its qualities render it practically invisible to radar, enabling her to survive the initial alien attack and give her the opportunity to make light ground attacks on unsuspecting Race encampments. She develops a relationship with Colonel Jäger after she finds him conversing with some farmers. While she is suspicious of this German officer at first, both of them come to realize that there are human beings on either side of the propaganda-heavy front. Nevertheless, she treads very carefully when developing their relationship, as his letters to her are monitored and recorded by the NKVD. The character is inspired by members of the historical all-women Soviet unit known as Night Witches, many of whom were decorated for their World War II service. The two flee to the city of Lodz after meeting in northwestern Poland (Jäger is serving on Germany's border with Poland), and help foil Otto Skorzeny's plot to set off an atomic bomb in the city.
Lydia Litvyak
On August 1, 1943, Litvyak did not come back to her base at Krasnyy Luch. It was her fourth sortie of the day, escorting a flight of Ilyushin Il-2 ground-attack aircraft. As the Soviets were returning to base near Orel, a pair of Bf 109 fighters dived on Litvyak while she was attacking a large group of German bombers. Soviet pilot Ivan Borisenko recalled: “Lily just didn’t see the Messerschmitt 109s flying cover for the German bombers. A pair of them dived on her and when she did see them she turned to meet them. Then they all disappeared behind a cloud.” Borisenko, involved in the dogfight, saw her the last time, through a gap in the clouds, her Yak-1 pouring smoke and pursued by as many as eight Bf 109s.
Hristo Georgiev (serial killer)
Additional trouble also cause fake leads, made from people who wanted to impress somebody. One such person, a man nicknamed "Pesho", told a former female classmate and her colleague working in a library, that his friend, called Pencho, often took girls who hitchhiked and forced them to have sex with him. A short time before the murder, the two men had taken a shared acquaintance and had sex with her, after which they had to drink antibiotics. Affected from this situation and hearing about the murder, Pesho told the two women how Pencho had beaten up "some slut with syphilis", who infected him. The women then informed the police, whom later realised that the hooligans had stable alibis. In the end, 154 people were established as having connections to her, 23 of whom were her intimate partners (4 of them with syphilis), as well as 800 mentally ill being questioned and 45 witness testimonies being investigated by agents. Yet, it was to no avail.
As previously mentioned, Gospodinova (née Naidenova) was murdered 17 days after Stancheva. Her body was found next to a metal shack on October 23, 1979 on "Kozloduy" Street No. 4, with a total of 36 stab wounds located on the body. Next to the body, traces of a knife, coins, medicine, a woman's coat, a small mirror, purse, two packs of cigarettes, condoms, a PFC Levski Sofia badge and a passport were found. A small knife was found in one of her pockets. The body was found in a sitting position, on top of some old cables. She was undressed down to her waist, with her bra and blouse behind her.
Alexander Pichushkin
Pichushkin committed his first known murder as a student in 1992 and stepped up his crimes in 2001. Russian media has speculated that Pichushkin was motivated, in part, by a macabre competition with another notorious Russian serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, the 'Rostov Ripper', who was convicted in 1992 of killing 53 children and young women over a 12-year period. Pichushkin has said his aim was to kill 64 people, the number of squares on a chessboard. He later recanted this statement, saying that he would have continued killing indefinitely had he not been stopped.
Sluzhba Bezpeky
On 21 June 1948 Soviet investigators uncovered eighteen corpses — seventeen female and one male that were allegedly killed since November 1947 by an OUN/UPA SB unit. The corpses were so badly decomposed that only six could be identified. One corpse had more than a metre of rope around her neck. The SB squad allegedly responsible for the crime had nine members, and acted on the direct instructions of the commander of an UPA regiment based in a nearby forest. All of the executions had been perpetrated under orders. One of the SB unit members had been recruited into the unit by an old friend, Zakharyi Lychko, an officer from the Ukrainian SS Galicia Division, who was arrested in 1946.
Lydia Litvyak
In an attempt to prove that Litvyak had not been taken captive, Pasportnikova embarked on a 36-year search for the Yakovlev Yak-1 crash site assisted by the public and the media. For three years she was joined by relatives who together combed the most likely areas with a metal detector. In 1979, after uncovering more than 90 other crash sites, 30 aircraft and many lost pilots killed in action, "the searchers discovered that an unidentified woman pilot had been buried in the village of Dmitrievka... in Shakhterski district." It was then assumed that it was Litvyak and that she had been killed in action after sustaining a mortal head wound. Pasportnikova said that a special commission was formed to inspect the exhumed body and it concluded the remains were those of Litvyak.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
After the war, she finished her education at Kiev University and began a career as a historian. From 1945 to 1953, she was a research assistant of the Chief HQ of the Soviet Navy. She was later active in the Soviet Committee of the Veterans of War. Pavlichenko died on 10 October 1974 at age 58, and was buried in the Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow.
Dnepropetrovsk maniacs
On 1 July, two more victims, Yevgenia Grischenko and Nikolai Serchuk, were found murdered in the nearby town of Novomoskovsk. On the night of 6 July, three more people were murdered in Dnipropetrovsk. The first was Egor Nechvoloda, a recently discharged army recruit, who was bludgeoned while walking home from a nightclub. His mother found the body in the morning by their apartment building on Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street. Yelena Shram, a 28‑year-old night guard, was then murdered around the corner on Kosiora Street. According to Sayenko's taped confession, as Shram walked towards them, Suprunyuk struck her with the hammer he had been hiding under his shirt and struck her several more times after she fell down. She had been carrying a bag filled with clothes. The men picked up the bag, used the clothes to clean the hammer, and threw the bag out. Later the same night, the men murdered a woman named Valentina Hanzha (no apparent relation to co-defendant Alexander Hanzha), a mother of three with a disabled husband.
Maria Petrova (spree killer)
Maria Aleksandrovna Petrova (born May 15, 1978), known as the "Zyuzino Maniac", is a Russian spree killer who killed two men and attempted to kill others. Her crimes, to some extent, are unique in the criminal history of Russia.
Lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson
According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,745 people are recorded as having been lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1964; 3,446 (72.7 percent) of them were black. Lynching came to be associated with the Deep South; 73 percent of lynchings took place in the Southern United States. Between 1882 and 1903, 125 black-on-black lynchings were recorded in 10 southern states, as were four cases of whites being killed by black mobs. There were 115 recorded cases of women lynched between 1851 and 1946; 90 were black, 19 white, and six Hispanic or uncertain. Women were usually lynched as accomplices of men who were being lynched; of 97 incidents examined by historian Kerry Segrave, 36 were of women lynched alone.
This machine kills fascists
Guthrie did celebrate the killing of fascists by Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko in his song "Miss Pavlichenko" which includes the lines, "You lift up your sight and down comes a hun, 
and more than three hundred nazidogs fell by your gun."
Liudmila Privivkova
Key
Andrei Chikatilo
Chikatilo followed the investigation carefully, reading newspaper reports about the manhunt for the killer which had begun to appear in the news media, and keeping his homicidal urges under control. For almost a year following the August 1985 murder of Irina Gulyaeva, no further victims were found in either the Rostov or Moscow Oblasts whose bodies bore the signature mutilations of the unknown murderer. Investigators did tentatively link the murder of a 33-year-old woman named Lyubov Golovakha—found stabbed to death in the Myasnikovsky District of Rostov on 23 July 1986—to the investigation, although this was solely upon the basis that the killer's semen type matched that of the killer they were seeking, that the victim had been stripped naked prior to her murder, and that she had been stabbed in excess of 20 times. The victim had not been dismembered or otherwise mutilated, nor had she been seen near mass transportation. Because of these discrepancies, many investigators expressed serious doubts as to whether Golovakha's murder had been committed by the killer they were seeking.
Irina Khakamada
Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko said he had learned from Anna Politkovskaya that Putin asked Khakamada to pass a threat to Politkovskaya. Khakamada denied her involvement in passing any specific threats, and said that she warned Politkovskaya only in general terms more than a year earlier, and that Politkovskaya blamed her and Mikhail Kasyanov for becoming Kremlin's puppets. Politkovskaya and Litvinenko were murdered in October and November 2006, respectively.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Pavlichenko's war record was recognized in the Soviet Union by two commemorative stamps with her portrait (see images above). She was awarded the following:
Alexander Pokryshkin
In recent years the actual number of Pokryshkin's kills seems to have become controversial. For example, Russian historian Mikhail Yurevich Vykov researched official records of victories, and downsized his tally to 46 individual and 6 shared victories. This author, together with Aleksandr Rodionov, wrote an article named "Mutnoye Nebo 1941 goda" ("The Murky Sky of 1941") stating that Pokryshkin tried to steal Rechkalov's kills during 1941. However, researcher Oleg V. Levchenko discovered passages written in official documents, in personal documents of Pokryshkin found after his death (that he kept away of his family) and in memoirs of Pokryshkin's comrades, that Pokryshkin in fact shot down 94 enemy aircraft, damaged 19 and destroyed three more on the ground. Levchenko found that no less than 15 victories scored in 1941 were not taken into account, because the documents confirming them were destroyed during the hurried withdrawal from encirclement during the Battle of Uman. This may explain the differences seen between the figures of Vykov and Levchenko.
Sergei Dovzhenko
At this time, for the murder of Vitaly Shemyakov, a man named Yegorov was convicted. Shemyakov's mother, Claudia Bondarenko, did not believe the physically weak Yegorov could deal with her son. In addition, she supported the version of the press that the killer was a former soldier or policeman. Sooner or later, she could have suspected a friend of her son—Sergei Dovzhenko. The murderer decided to get rid of Bondarenko. On June 27, 2001, Dovzhenko killed Claudia Bondarenko at her home. To ward off suspicion, he staged an assault with a robbery of Bondarenko's neighbours, during which he killed Galina Ivanova and her 12-year-old granddaughter Tanya. Dovzhenko took 3 thousand dollars from their apartment.
Alexander Pichushkin
Pichushkin targeted primarily elderly homeless men by luring them with the offer of free vodka. After drinking with them, he would kill them with repeated blows to the head with a hammer. In what became his trademark, or signature, he would then push a vodka bottle into the gaping wound in their skulls. He also targeted younger men, children and women. He would always attack from behind in order to take the victim by surprise and to avoid spilling blood on his clothes. He claimed that while killing people he felt like God as he decided whether his victims should live or die. "In all cases I killed for only one reason. I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live," he once said. "For me, life without murder is like life without food for you. I felt like the father of all these people, since it was me who opened the door for them to another world." Experts at the Serbsky Institute, Russia's main psychiatric clinic, have found Pichushkin sane, but suffering from antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder .
Soviet destroyer Stremitelny (1937)
When Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on 22 June 1941, the ship was based in Polyarny. Together with her sisters and , "Stremitelny" covered the landing of troops on the western side of the mouth of the Zapadnaya Litsa River on 14 July during Operation Platinum Fox, the German attempt to capture Murmansk. Six days later, she was attacked by Junkers Ju 87 "Stuka" dive bombers while docked in Polyarny and was struck by four bombs amidships. They detonated in the boiler and engine rooms, killing all the crewmen in those compartments and breaking the ship in half. The stern section sank in a few minutes, but the bow section took 20 minutes to sink. A total of 111 people were killed, including several entertainers who were giving a performance aboard when the aircraft attacked. Her wreck was partially salvaged in April 1942 and her stern was used to repair her sister .
Alexander Pavlenko
Pavlenko was arrested after a victim of his jumped out the window, breaking her leg, and writing a statement on rape on a hospital bed. In his apartment, a large amount of women's underwear, blood traces, hacksaws, knives, needles, tongs, handcuffs, axes, several albums and about 20 negative films with pornographic material were found druing the search. After his detention, Pavlenko was questioned not only for the crimes he had confessed to. Over the past summer in Barnaul, five abiturs of the Altai State Technical University had disappeared. Soon, on suspicion of committing the murders, a market trader named Alexander Anisimov was detained, who soon confessed to everything. However, Anisimov threw himself out the window during the investigative experiment, and the case remained undisclosed.
Andrei Chikatilo
On 11 December 1982 Chikatilo encountered a 10-year-old girl, named Olga Stalmachenok, riding a bus to her parents' home in Novoshakhtinsk and persuaded the child to leave the bus with him. She was last seen by a fellow passenger, who reported the girl was being led firmly by the hand by a middle-aged man. Stalmachenok was lured to a cornfield on the outskirts of Novoshakhtinsk before she was killed. Chikatilo stabbed the girl in excess of 50 times around the head and body, ripped open her chest and excised her lower bowel and uterus.
Beautiful Assassin
The story is loosely based on an actual female Soviet soldier, Lyudmila Pavlichenko. I've fictionalized her character and am telling the story from her own point of view. Tat'yana is an amazing woman for her time or for ours—strong, brave, intelligent, loyal, and sensitive. I find her to be a remarkable woman in a remarkable time.
Zinaida Tusnolobova-Marchenko
During her first eight months of military service, she evacuated 123 wounded Soviet soldiers from the battlefield. On 2 February 1943 while trying to rescue a wounded platoon commander she was seriously injured, with both of her legs broken. As German soldiers ran across the battlefield she pretended to be dead, but one soldier noticed she was alive and began viciously beating her, nearly to death. A night reconnaissance platoon noticed she was still alive and managed to get her to a field hospital three days later. Having suffered from severe frostbite doctors had to perform eight surgeries to save her life, amputating her left hand, entire right arm, left foot and right leg up to the knee. During the remainder of the war while she was recovering she wrote an open letter to the 1st Baltic Front asking them to take revenge for the suffering inflicted in her and others. In her letter she opened by stating she had been stuck in a hospital bed for 15 months because of the Axis, referring to the Axis only as "the fascists", briefly mentioned her life before the war but went straight to describing her anger at the Axis for how she had to write with a pencil tied to the stub of her elbow, how her brother lost his hand and her husband died in the war, putting it bluntly as "The fascists did it" before ending the letter asking them not to spare a single German soldier to take revenge for the Russian people. The letter resulted in over 3,000 letters and replies from the troops, promising revenge in her name. Numerous Soviet tanks and aircraft bore the text of saying things like "This is for Zinaida" and "For Zinaida Tusnolobova" (Russian: За Зину Туснолобову!), a practice so popular that another Hero of the Soviet Union, Pyotr Andreev, had it written on his plane.
Richard Speck
At 11:00 p.m. on July 13, 1966, Speck broke into the 2319 E. 100th St townhouse in Chicago's Jeffery Manor neighborhood; the townhouse was functioning as a dormitory for student nurses. Armed with only a knife, he entered and then killed Gloria Davy, Patricia Matusek, Nina Jo Schmale, Pamela Wilkening, Suzanne Farris, Mary Ann Jordan, Merlita Gargullo and Valentina Pasion. Speck, who later claimed he was both drunk and high on drugs, may have originally planned to commit a routine burglary. Speck held the women in a room for hours, leading them out one by one, stabbing or strangling each to death, then finally raping and strangling his last victim, Gloria Davy. One woman, Corazon Amurao, escaped death because she crawled and hid under a bed while Speck was out of the room. Speck possibly lost count or might have known eight women lived in the townhouse but did not realize a ninth woman was spending the night. Amurao stayed hidden until almost 6 a.m.
Nina Lobkovskaya
She was born the eldest of five children in Siberia. Her family moved to Stalinabad in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic following the ill health of her father Alexei who had enlisted in the Red Army in 1942 before being killed in the battle for Voronezh in October of the same year. While the Second World War was not fought in Tajikistan itself, after the arrival of numerous refugees from the war to the Tajik SSR Lobkovskaya took the impact of the war to heart and volunteered for the military after graduating from school under the advice of the Komsomol.
Lobkovskaya was one of 300 women sent to Veshnyaki in Eastern Russia to train as snipers at the Central Women’s Sniper Training School. From February 1945 until the end of the war, Lobkovskaya commanded a company of female snipers who eventually saw action in the Battle of Berlin. On one night while defending a section of road the unit assisted in the capture of 27 enemy combatants. During the war she reached 89 confirmed kills of enemy combatants, having fought on the Baltic and Belorussian Fronts.
Vladimir Ionesyan
Alevtina Dmitrieva was recognized as an accomplice, although Ionesyan shielded her during interrogations, claiming that she knew nothing about the murders, and even her fault, according to later testimonies of forensics experts, was not proven by the court. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but later in 1972 (or in 1974) she was released early.
In March 2015, a 20-year-old Tajik native named Anusherov Rakhmanov was captured in Moscow, who imitated Ionesyan. Rakhmanov also broke into apartments of Muscovites under the guise of being a gas service worker and exterminated whole families, inflicting stab wounds on people. The investigation suspected him of 7 murders total. He was found hanging on April 2 in his cell at Matrosskaya Tishina, was rescued and taken to hospital, where he died the next day, without regaining consciousness.
June Uprising in Lithuania
Despite the generally friendly Lithuanian attitude, the Germans carried out several punitive executions. For example, 42 civilians from Ablinga village were murdered in response to German deaths. After two German guards in Alytus were shot by unknown perpetrators, the Nazis shot 42 Lithuanian rebels. The terror in Alytus continued to the next day: the Germans selected men, age 15–50, and executed them in groups of 20–25. More atrocities were carried out by the retreating Red Army. About 4,000 political and criminal prisoners, arrested during the first Soviet occupation, were to be transported to Russia. NKVD organized prisoner massacres in Rainiai, Pravieniškės, Panevėžys. A total of 40 locations of mass killings have been identified in Lithuania. Many others were killed en route to Soviet prisons. The largest such massacre took place near Chervyen in present-day Belarus. A list of NKVD victims in Lithuania, compiled during the Nazi occupation, includes 769 people that did not participate in the uprising.
Richard Kuklinski
Kuklinski would claim to have killed numerous people over the next 30 years. He also claimed to have shot Carmine Galante. Lack of attention from law enforcement was partly due to his consciously ever-changing methods which did not establish a "modus operandi": he used guns, knives, explosives, tire irons, fire, poison, asphyxiation, feeding people to cave rats, and even bare-handed beatings "just for the exercise". The exact number has never been settled upon by authorities, and Kuklinski himself at various times claimed to have killed more than 200 people. He favored the use of cyanide, since it killed quickly, wasn't blood-messy and was hard to detect in a toxicology test. He would variously administer it by injection, by putting it on a person's food, by aerosol spray, or by simply spilling it on the victim's skin. One of his favorite methods of disposing of a body was to place it in a 55-gallon oil drum. His other disposal methods included dismemberment, burial, or placing the body in the trunk of a car and having it crushed in a junkyard. He also claimed to have fed living human beings to cave rats in Pennsylvania and recorded footage in order to collect contracts for torture and safe disposal of a body. Upon viewing one of these tapes, DeMeo reportedly could not finish watching and said Kuklinski "had no soul". Kuklinski described that the rats would dispose of a human body in about 2 days, including the bones, leaving not even a trace.
Ella Polyakova
She has also said more than 100 Russian soldiers were killed in eastern Ukraine in a single battle in August 2014 while helping pro-Russian separatists fight Ukrainian troops. According to her, around 300 people were also wounded in the same incident near the town of Snizhnye, when a column of trucks they were driving, full of ammunition, was hit by a sustained volley of Grad missiles.
Nina Lobkovskaya
Nina Alexeyevna Lobkovskaya () (born 18 March 1925) served as a sniper for the Red Army and attained the rank of Lieutenant in a separate sniper unit of the 3rd Shock Army during World War II. In the war she reached 89 confirmed kills, making her the tenth deadliest female sniper in the war.
Dmitry Voronenko
According to the testimony of witnesses, a facial composite of the killer was drawn up. At the disposal of the authorities were records from external surveillance cameras at one of the murder sites. As a result, 863 people previously convicted for sexual crimes were tested. During the search, information was received about Voronenko. His address was traced, and on May 24, 2007, he was ambushed and arrested. At first he was suspected only in the last murder, but subsequently confessed to the previous three. Forensic psychiatric examination recognized Voronenko as insane. The killer did not regret his deeds. These were Voronenko's last words at his trial: At the trial, the parents of the murdered girls and the prosecutor demanded the death penalty for Voronenko, but the court did not consider it possible to make such a verdict due to the moratorium on the death penalty, and on March 20, 2008, the St. Petersburg City Court sentenced him to life imprisonment. Relatives of the victims appealed to the Russian Supreme Court demanding the death penalty, but the verdict was left unchanged. Voronenko is currently serving his sentence in the "Polar Owl" penitentiary.
Timofey Podshivalov
From July 15 to August 28, 2011 in the Kirovsky City District, he killed four people - three homeless and an employee of a construction firm. On the eve of the first murder, on July 14, he had just finished reporting to his probation officer. Podshivalov tried to burn the bodies of his first two victims, but left the bodies of the last two at the crime scene. All the killings were committed with particular cruelty: he beat his injured victims with using his hands and feet, sticks, stones, even striking them with a knife and then an axe. Podshivalov also stole a tracksuit and a mobile phone from his last victim.
Roman Pavlyuchenko
Russia
Valentina Shevchenko (fighter)
From 2003 to 2015, Shevchenko collectively won more than 50 amateur/pro matches in K-1, Muay Thai and kickboxing (five were won by technical knockout, three were won by knockout). She received her first and only loss in kickboxing when she fought Wang Cong (aka Cong Wang) in 2015. Shevchenko won 8 gold medals (2003, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014) when she competed in the IFMA world championships, as well as the IMFA Royal World Cup in 2015. She defeated future UFC Women's Strawweight Champion Joanna Jędrzejczyk three times and future UFC fighter Lina Länsberg once, during these competitions. Shevchenko is considered to be one of the best female Muay Thai fighters in the world.
Tatyana Kostyrina
Kostyrina joined the Red Army in August 1942 and graduated from sniper courses. She fought as a sniper in the 691st Rifle Regiment of the 383rd Rifle Division, Separate Coastal Army in battles for Kuban, Kerch, and Crimea. She died in the battle for Adzhimushka, in which she killed 15 enemies after taking over the duties of the battalion commander, leading her battalion into the flight and remaining on the battlefield even after she was wounded in hand-to-hand combat. In a fight in the trenches a German soldier rushed at her but Kostyrina shot him first only to be killed by a stray enemy bullet. In total throughout her military career she killed 120 enemy combats, for which she was recommended for the title Hero of the Soviet Union the day she died in battle by Major-General Gorbachev, which was posthumously awarded in 1944 with an Order of Lenin.
Anatoly Slivko
On June 2, 1964, Slivko killed his first victim, a 15-year-old runaway boy named Nikolai Dobryshev. Slivko claimed this particular victim was killed unintentionally, being unable to revive Dobryshev once he was unconscious. He dismembered the boy's body and buried him, also destroying the film and photographs he had taken of this particular victim. In May 1965, Slivko killed his second victim, Aleksei Kovalenko. Slivko began operating a club for boys named "Chergid" in 1966, after his first club had been destroyed in a fire.
Sergey Sergeev (spree killer)
On June 29, Sergeev he broke into a factory on Dzerzhinsky Street in Zaporozhia, stole several ushankas (Russian fur hats with ear flaps) and gold ornaments, and then killed cleaning woman Natalia Yurchenko. On the same day, Sergeev broke into his ex-girlfriend's apartment and stabbed her new boyfriend several times with a knife.
Timeline of the war in Donbass (January 2017)
According to the information published by the ATO press-centre in the evening, as of 6:00 pm pro-Russian forces had opened fire on Ukrainian positions on 37 occasions. Around Donetsk city, pro-Russian tanks engaged the Ukrainian strongholds of Avdiivka and Pisky. Krasnohorivka was shelled with 82 mm mortars, while Nevelske, Opytne and Avdiivka became the target of small arms, rocket launchers, 82 mm mortars, 120 mm mortars, 122 mm and 152 mm self-propelled artillery. The same kind of weapons were used by the rebels to attack Luhanske, north of Horlivka. In the region of Mariupol, 152 mm artillery barrages landed in Vodiane, and 82 mm mortar volleys struck Lebedynske. Ukrainian troops at Pavlopil, Talakivka, Hnutove, Shyrokyne and Vodiane were engaged with small arms and grenade launchers. Three Ukrainian servicemen were killed, seventeen wounded, and three injured. A female civilian was killed by shelling in Makiivka.
Soviet women in World War II
The Soviet Union deployed women as snipers. Between 1941 and 1945, a total of 2,484 soviet female snipers were functioning in this role, of whom about 500 survived the war. Their combined tally of kill claims is at least 11,000. The most famous snipers during the war included Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Roza Shanina.
Pavlivka, Volyn Oblast
On 11 July 1943, units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and OUN nationalists murdered Polish inhabitants of the town. Most people were killed during a ceremony in a local Roman Catholic church. The Ukrainian sotnia of 20 men surrounded and entered the church filled with people. They threw grenades at the faithful most of whom were women and children. Then they shot at them with machine guns and finally set fire to the church with survivors in hiding. Altogether 300 persons were murdered. Later on, Ukrainian nationalists burned what remained of the Czacki palace. The town was captured by the Red Army on 18 July 1944.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
The first English language edition of her memoirs, titled "Lady Death", was published by Greenhill Books in February 2018. The book has a foreword by Martin Pegler and is part of the Greenhill Books Sniper Library series. The book was serialised in the "Mail on Sunday" newspaper on Sunday 18 March 2018.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Born in Bila Tserkva in the Russian Empire (currently located in Ukraine) on 12 July 1916, Pavlichenko (née Belova) moved to Kiev with her family at the age of fourteen. There she joined a OSOAVIAKhIM shooting club and developed into an amateur sharpshooter, while working as a grinder at the Kiev Arsenal factory. In 1932, at the age of 16, she married Alexei Pavlichenko and gave birth to a son Rostislav (1932-2007), but soon they divorced. In 1937, as a student of Kiev University she completed a master's degree in history, focusing on the life of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
Academy maniacs
Olga Lipchinskaya, a journalist of "Komsomolskaya Pravda", a month before the arrest of the "Molotchniki", when, accordingly, no one could establish their identities, gave this description of the "Academy Maniac":
On January 15, 2011, on suspicion of murdering the unknown homeless man, the homeless 19-year-old Vladimir Bazilevsky, who had blood on his clothes, was detained. On the night of January 1, Bazilevsky, according to his statements, had spent in a sewer well, but the operative who interrogated him began to convince him otherwise using beatings. According to Bazilevsky, the investigator literally knocked out a murder confession from him, forcing him to write it down. The name of murdered - Andrei, nicknamed "Taiga" - Bazilevsky gave under pressure: that was the name of one of his friends. During the investigative experiment, Bazilevsky explained how the murder took place and where the body laid, taking his testimony to the camera. In fact, based on results from a biological examination, which showed the blood of the murdered and the blood on Bazilevsky's clothes matched, Judge Andrei Obyskalov convicted Bazilevsky in April 2011, sentencing him to 4 years. Subsequently, investigator Yevgeny Karchevsky, while checking the man's testimony, found with the help of an investigator from the Sverdlovsk Oblast that the blood on Bazilevsky's clothes did not match the victim's. In addition to this, the investigators found that Andrei "Taiga" was actually alive. He asked the prosecutor's office to reconsider the case, but he was refused. However, the lawyers of the human rights organization Public Verdict soon found out about it, because of which Karchevsky's second petition was granted. In May 2012, Bazilevsky, after one and a half years imprisonment, was released from prison, and all charges against him were dropped. The operative who pressed him was never found. Another officer, Yuri Fedorov, was accused of falsifying evidence and removed from work at the end of July. On October 9, 2014, he was sentenced to three years with 2 years prohition of holding posts in state and municipal services. Fedorov did not admit guilt and filed an appeal, after which in February 2015 his sentence was canceled and sent for review. For the illega sentence, Bazilevsky's lawyer demanded compensation from the state amounting to 3,000,000 rubles, but as a result, on November 19, 2013, the Sverdlovsk District Court of Irkutsk ordered the state to pay only 300,000 rubles.
A few days before his arrest, Lytkin's mother found a knife packaged in the hallway (according to other sources, she found the knife in a pocket of his jacket). When asked why he needed a knife, Nikita answered that he has it for self-defense. A little later, he said to his grandmother: "I will soon be lost." Both were arrested on April 5, 2011, after the alleged facial composites were distributed at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, where Lytkin's grandmother worked at the time. His grandmother and Nikita's uncle Vladislav studied the images, and suspecting something was wrong, Vladislav went to Lytkin's house. Nikita was not at home then, but at that very moment he had left his camera, in which he inadvertedly left a flash card with a recording of Alevtina Kuydina's murder. Upon seeing the recording, Vladislav took the camera to the police, and after an hour and a half the "Molotchniki" were detained by officers. Lytkin reacted calmly to the arrest, as the relatives persuaded him to surrender. By midnight, Lytkin and Anoufriev confessed to the authorities about five of the murders and six other attacks. When Anoufriev signed the protocol, he imitating Pichushkin, told investigator Yevgeny Karchevsky that: "As one hero said, give me a glass of whiskey and a cigar - and you will learn so much new about this life that your hair will begin to move on your head." Later the number of crimes increased to six murders and ten attacks. Anoufriev and Lytkin also added that in the evening of that day they had planned another murder.
Sandra Samuel
On 26 November 2008, as the Mumbai attacks began, a group of attackers entered the Chabad house and began shooting at everyone inside. Samuel heard gunshots and locked herself in a laundry room as she heard Rivka screaming. Later, she heard Moshe calling out her name and crying. After emerging from the room and running upstairs, she found Gavriel and Rivka motionless and covered in blood with Moshe crying beside them, his pants drenched in blood. With the attackers still inside, Samuel said she grabbed Moshe and ran from the building. Later, when Indian commando teams stormed the house, it was confirmed that Gavriel and Rivka were among the 173 people killed in the attacks, and that Moshe was now an orphan.
Evilenko
Almost eight years later, Lesiev finally captures Evilenko, who by now has killed 55 people, mostly children and young women. On 22 May 1992, Evilenko goes to court, and on 14 February 1994, he is finally executed. Before his execution, several governments expressed interest in Evilenko's psychic abilities and asked for extradition of Evilenko but were denied.The story is a fictionalization of the life and crimes of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Large segments of the film were adapted from Grieco's novel entitled "The Communist Who Ate Children". The character is renamed "Andrei Evilenko" in reference to Chikatilo.
Nizhny Tagil mass murder (2002–07)
According to police investigations of the mass grave, the murders of the girls were committed between 2002 and 2005 in the city of Nizhny Tagil, the towns of Kirovgrad and Kushva, and the districts of Nevyansky District and Prigorodny District, all in Sverdlovsk Oblast. Police arrested a gang of eight men, aged 25 to 46, accused of having abducted numerous local girls beginning in 2002, who were then raped, beaten, and under the threat of death forced to work as prostitutes in a brothel disguised as a massage parlor. Some of the girls were forced to write reassuring letters to their families. It was alleged that one of the murdered girls, Elena Chudinova, was the 14-year-old daughter of one of the gang leaders, Eduard "Edik" Chudinov.
Polish–Ukrainian War
On 24 November 1919 the village of Bilka Szlachecka was attacked by Ukrainian forces, burned down and its civilian population massacred, with 45 civilians murdered and 22 wounded. In Chodaczkow Wielki, 4 Polish girls were murdered by Ukrainian soldiers and their bodies mutilated. A special Polish commission for investigation of these atrocities established that even more drastic events occurred, but refused to blame Ukrainian nation for them, putting the blame for them on small percentage of Ukrainian society, mainly soldiers, peasants and so called "half-intelligentsia", that is village teachers, officers and members of gendarmerie. The commission, which included representatives from Italy and France, established that in just three districts 90 murders were committed on civilians besides robberies. Numerous churches desecrated by Ukrainian forces as well. Nuns from three cloisters were raped and later murdered by being blown up by explosive granades. They were cases of people being buried alive. The commission also noted however that several Ukrainian villagers have hidden Poles. The head of the commission, Zamorski recommended imprisonment of culprits of the atrocities, while establishing friendly relationship with Ukrainian population based on existing laws. .
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Pavlichenko was a subject of the 2015 film, "Battle for Sevastopol" (original Ukrainian title, "Незламна " ("Indestructible" / "Unbreakable")). A joint Russian-Ukrainian production, it was released in both countries on 2 April 2015. The international premiere took place two weeks later at the Beijing International Film Festival.
Vladimir Ionesyan
On December 25, 1963, Ionesyan, together with Dmitrieva, came to Ivanovo, where he committed two murders. Continuing to pretend to be a gas worker, he entered apartments and looked for suitable victims. In an apartment on Kalinin Street he killed a 12-year-old boy named Mikhail Kuleshov with an axe, then stole his jacket, a pullover, two pens and several bonds. In another apartment, on Oktyabrskaya Street, he killed a 74-year-old woman, but only took a pocket flashlight and 70 kopeks from her apartment. Returning to Kalinin Street, he again began to walk around the apartments. In one of them he attacked 15-year-old Galina Petropavlovskaya, who was raped and then struck nine times to the head with the axe. Ionesyan then took a sweater, a jacket, a fluffy shawl and 90 rubles. Despite her injuries, Petropavlovskaya survived and was able to describe her attacker's appearance.
Alexander Pichushkin
He was arrested on 16 June 2006, and convicted on 24 October 2007 of 49 murders and 3 attempted murders. He asked a Russian court to add an additional 11 victims to his body count, bringing his claimed death toll to 60, and 3 surviving victims. During his trial, as with Andrei Chikatilo, Pichushkin was housed in a glass cage for his own protection. It took Judge Vladimir Usov an hour to read the verdict: life in prison with the first 15 years to be spent in solitary confinement.
Krzysztof Gawlik
Krzysztof Gawlik got his nickname from murdering people with the Škorpion type silenced machine gun. Each victim was shot several times with a characteristic execution shot in the back of the head, along with some stabbing traces on the body. Gawlik's first victim was an almost 18-year-old prostitute Sylwia L. from Poznań. The murderer met her (apparently) on February 6, 2001, responding to an advertisement she placed in the press. The next victim of "Scorpio" was an Ukrainian - Lesia H., a prostitute working in Wrocław and Tomasz S., a man associated with her. He shot them three days after committing the first crime, according to various sources in a public house of their apartament in Wrocław. In March 2001, Gawlik killed another two people - a married couple from Wrocław, whom he most likely from responding to their car sales offer.
Siege of Leningrad
By December 1942 the NKVD had arrested 2,105 cannibals – dividing them into two legal categories: corpse-eating ("trupoyedstvo") and person-eating ("lyudoyedstvo"). The latter were usually shot while the former were sent to prison. The Soviet Criminal Code had no provision for cannibalism, so all convictions were carried out under Code Article 59–3, "special category banditry". Instances of person-eating were significantly lower than that of corpse-eating; of the 300 people arrested in April 1942 for cannibalism, only 44 were murderers. 64% of cannibals were female, 44% were unemployed, 90% were illiterate, 15% were rooted inhabitants, and only 2% had any criminal records. More cases occurred in the outlying districts than in the city itself. Cannibals were often unsupported women with dependent children and no previous convictions, which allowed for a certain level of clemency in legal proceedings.
Dmitry Gridin
The first murder Gridin committed was on July 31, 1989, killing 16-year-old Zhana Terenchuk in the porch of her house. Then there were three unsuccessful attacks on girls, one of them giving a detailed description of the "Lifter". A month later he again committed two murders at once (Danzili Usmanova and Lyudmila Pozdnyakova). On the site of one of the murders he left a fingerprint. On November 25, 1989, Gridin tried to make another attack, but the girl gave him serious resistance, and he ran in fear, dropping his hat and glasses. It was because of these signs that he was soon detained, since it -20° C on the street, and Gridin stood out too much from the crowd. In addition, at the time of his arrest a knife was taken away from him.
Yury A. Dmitriev
Sandarmokh contains over 9,000 of Stalin's executed victims of more than 50 Soviet and other nationalities. Drawing on information from the archives, Dmitriev identified the nine thousand men and women shot at Sandarmokh as follows:
"3,500 were inhabitants of Karelia, 4,500 were prisoners working for the White Sea - Baltic Canal, and 1,111 were brought there from the Solovki "special" prison. Alongside hard-working peasants, fishermen and hunters from nearby villages, writers and poets, scientists and scholars, military leaders, doctors, teachers, engineers, clergy of all confessions and statesmen found their final resting place there."
Maksim Gelman stabbing spree
Gelman later stated that since he knew he would be caught, he was going to take down "rats" who had wronged him. Gelman then went to the house of a female acquaintance named Yelena Bulchenko, where he killed her mother, Anna, at about 10:30 a.m. He then allegedly left the crime scene and waited several hours for Yelena, who had been staying at a friend's house, to return home. Once she did, she found Anna dead and called 9-1-1, but Gelman was on his way back to the scene to check if she returned home. Upon arrival at about 4:00 p.m., he spotted her outside on the phone and got out of the car, upon which she yelled at him. He hid the knife in his jacket sleeve and approached her, but she took off running. However, Gelman caught up with her and stabbed her eleven times, killing her, before speeding off in Kuznetsov's car. Ramming into another car, Gelman stabbed and wounded the driver, Arthur DiCrescento, three times when he confronted him, before carjacking the vehicle. Gelman later ran down 62-year-old pedestrian Stephen Tanenbaum, who subsequently died of his injuries.
Olga of Kiev
With the best and wisest men out of the way, she planned to destroy the remaining Drevlians. She invited them to a funeral feast so she could mourn over her husband's grave. Her servants waited on them, and after the Drevlians were drunk, Olga's soldiers killed over 5,000 of them. She then placed the city under siege. She asked for three pigeons and three sparrows from each house; she claimed she did not want to burden the villagers any further after the siege. They were happy to comply with the request.
Battle for Sevastopol
Battle for Sevastopol (; "Indestructible") is a 2015 biographical war film about Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a young Soviet who joined the Red Army to fight the Nazi invasion of the USSR and became one of the deadliest snipers in World War II. The film, a joint Russian-Ukrainian production, was released in both countries on April 2, 2015; its international premiere took place two weeks later at the Beijing International Film Festival.
Pawłokoma massacre
While sources differ on specific issues like the number of the victims or details of the massacre, all agree that the Ukrainian villagers were murdered by Poles and that an Armia Krajowa unit (AK was disbandend in January 1945) either participated directly or assisted in the killings. The Pawłokoma Memorial places the number of victims at 365, the figure supported by IPN  and a number of Polish historians It is, however, questioned by a Polish historian Zdzisław Konieczny, author of a book on the Pawłokoma massacre, claiming that some 150 Ukrainian members of UIA had been killed, while women and children were ordered to leave in the direction of Bircza and Sanok.. Poles who participated in the event, claim that at most 120-150 Ukrainian men were killed, and there's no way that the graves they dug could fit 300 people. According to Ukrainian historian, Eugeniusz Misiło Józef Biss claimed that 80 people at most were killed that day.
Lyudmyla Pavlenko
Lyudmyla Volodymyrivna Pavlenko (, born 16 September 1981) is a Ukrainian Paralympic cross-country skier and biathlete, with cerebral palsy. She won a gold and bronze medal, at the 2014 Winter Paralympics.
Daria Pavliuchenko
With Khodykin
Dnepropetrovsk maniacs
The first two murders occurred late on 25 June 2007. The first victim was a 33-year-old woman, Yekaterina Ilchenko, who was walking home after having tea at her friend's apartment. According to Sayenko's confession, he and Suprunyuk were "out for a walk." Suprunyuk had a hammer. As Ilchenko walked past, Suprunyuk "spun around" and struck her in the side of the head. Ilchenko's body was found by her mother at 5 AM. Within an hour of the first murder, the two men attacked their next victim, Roman Tatarevich, as he slept on a bench near the first murder scene. Tatarevich's head was smashed with blunt objects numerous times, rendering him unrecognizable. The bench was located across the street from the local public prosecutor's office.
Lydia Litvyak
Lydia Vladimirovna Litvyak (Лидия Владимировна Литвяк, August 18, 1921, in Moscow – August 1, 1943, in Krasnyi Luch), also known as Lilya, was a fighter pilot in the Soviet Air Force during World War II. Historians estimates for her total victories range from five to twelve solo victories and two to four shared kills in her 66 combat sorties. In about two years of operations, she was the first female fighter pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft, the first of two female fighter pilots who have earned the title of fighter ace and the holder of the record for the greatest number of kills by a female fighter pilot. She was shot down near Orel during the Battle of Kursk as she attacked a formation of German aircraft.
Andrei Sibiryakov
Sibiryakov committed assaults in the same way: he introduced himself as an employee of the municipal engineering company "Lenenergo", then penetrated into apartments where there were only single women, killing and robbing them afterwards. In just a few weeks, he committed six attacks: five of them (on Nadezhda Mironovich, Elena Aleksandrova, two women named Deyeva and Valentinova, and Tatyana Pavlova) were fatal. In one more case, the victim, Viktoria Bodumyan, miraculously survived, because, after striking her with a knife, the maniac broke the handle. During another attack, Sibiryakov was frightened off, and did not manage to finish the crime. His modus operandi in many respects was similar to that of Vladimir Ionesyan, who had murdered 25 years before.
Andrei Chikatilo
Upon his release from prison in December 1984, Chikatilo found new work at a locomotive factory in Novocherkassk and kept a low profile. He did not kill again until 1 August 1985 when, on a business trip to Moscow, he encountered an 18-year-old woman, named Natalia Pokhlistova, at a railway platform near Domodedovo Airport. Pokhlistova was lured into a thicket of woods where she was bound, stabbed 38 times, then strangled to death. Based upon the hypothesis that the killer had travelled from the Rostov Oblast to Moscow via air, investigators checked all Aeroflot flight records of passengers who had commuted between Moscow and the Rostov Oblast between late July and early August. On this occasion, however, Chikatilo had travelled to Moscow by train and, accordingly, no documentation existed for investigators to research. Four weeks later, on 27 August, Chikatilo killed another young woman, Irina Gulyaeva, in Shakhty. As had been the case with Natalia Pokhlistova, the wounds inflicted upon the victim linked her murder to the hunt for the serial killer.