Belarusian Bluebeard released from Russian prison to die at home

In April 2025, 66-year-old Belarusian murderer Stepan Hancharyk was transferred from a Russian prison to a Temporary Detention Center for Foreign Citizens. He was awaiting deportation to Belarus — due to his health. Release "due to serious illness" exists in both Russian and Belarusian legislation, but is used very rarely. Usually, those eager to gain freedom through this legal loophole are denied. Some die in prison a few days after obtaining permission for release, but without ever managing to get out.

Hancharyk did not serve about seven years of his sentence in a Russian colony. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the murder of his wife, Yauheniya Silina, and her 17-year-old daughter Katsiaryna, a student at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. For several months after their deaths, he led the investigation astray, but eventually he was caught.

Three Wives — And All Three Vanished, Leaving Him Apartments

Stepan Hancharyk is one of the most famous Belarusian criminals in Russia; he became notorious due to his strange biography. Yauheniya Silina was his third wife — and all of them died under mysterious circumstances.

Hancharyk is a graduate of the Minsk Institute of Physical Culture. He served in Germany, in military intelligence. And in the 1980s, he pursued a Komsomol career, becoming head of a department of the Minsk City Komsomol Committee.

In 1985, stewardess Svetlana Minkova died. She was taking a bath and dropped a plugged-in hairdryer into the water. The expert examination recognized the situation as an accident.

Stepan had a son from that marriage — and this would repeatedly help him escape criminal prosecution.

Because already then, a case was opened against Hancharyk for torturing his wife. Neighbors said that a drunk Stepan beat Svetlana. But it all ended with a suspended sentence — he had a small child, after all.

Павялічыць

Hancharyk married for the second time in the mid-1990s. And after some time, his new wife, Russian Irina Kaftan, simply disappeared. She was never found. Hancharyk himself told everyone that she had moved to Germany and settled there.

Soon Stepan was arrested, but again not for murder. He was found with a pistol that had been used to kill a businessman. Hancharyk received two years in a penal colony for possession of a weapon, but with a deferred sentence — again because of his young son.

He did end up in a penal colony, though. In the early 2000s, he was imprisoned for large-scale fraud. He defrauded almost 200 people, collecting money from them for sending them to seasonal work in Sweden. For this, he received 6 years in a penal colony with confiscation of property.

Павялічыць

New Wife with an Apartment in Moscow

After his release, Stepan remembered an old friend — he had met Yauheniya Silina back in the 1980s. The girl, daughter of a Soviet military diplomat, was then studying in Minsk. She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy, and in the early 1990s returned to Moscow. She gave birth to a daughter, Katsiaryna, and lived in a three-room apartment in the city center, which she inherited after her parents' death.

Stepan and Yauheniya corresponded, and soon he moved to her in Moscow. They married in 2008, and started a business — Hancharyk imported Belarusian kitchens to Moscow.

The Murder Plot

Hancharyk, meanwhile, planned the murder of Yauheniya and her daughter Katsia. He believed that the Moscow apartment would then go to him as the sole heir.

In June 2010, he staged Yauheniya's departure to St. Petersburg, and then strangled her himself and buried the body in a pit in the Moscow region. Afterwards, he reported his wife's disappearance. She was sought for several months, but, of course, could not be found. Stepan, meanwhile, sent letters in the name of his deceased wife and told journalists that Yauheniya might have joined some sect.

Six months later, he also killed his stepdaughter, a journalism student at Moscow State University and a correspondent for the REX news agency. After this, he sent himself a letter in Katsiaryna's name — supposedly, she found her mother in St. Petersburg, so she asked them not to look for them. He also made sure to "obtain" a statement from his murdered wife that she was leaving all her property to him. Handwriting analysis showed that he wrote the letters himself.

However, Hancharyk never managed to take possession of the Moscow apartment. It turned out that he had not divorced his second wife, who disappeared but was never declared deceased. This meant he could not register his third marriage in Moscow.

20 Years Instead of Life Imprisonment

Hancharyk was somewhat lucky that he was sentenced to only 20 years. For Russia, his Belarusian convictions were irrelevant, so formally he was not considered to have a criminal record. For two murders, he received 20 years of imprisonment — initially 10 years in prison conditions, then 10 years in a strict regime colony. However, he was unable to serve them to the end.

Павялічыць

In the court hearing on deportation on April 28, 2025, a representative of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs assured that Hancharyk would be sent to Belarus, and that the procedure would be completed "in the coming days" — apparently, his health condition was such that they might not have managed if the deportation was delayed.

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