Participants in the “special military operation,” former convicts, tortured their acquaintance to death

In this episode of From Russia with Fear, we tell the story of 22-year-old Vadim Vashchenko from Lermontov, who was tortured to death by two ex-convicts pardoned for fighting in the war. We follow his mother’s battle to have the crime recognized as murder, look at another brutal case involving soldier Alexey Kostrikin, and examine how wartime laws let thousands of violent offenders walk free — turning the front line into a conveyor belt of new crimes at home.