On December 15, 2008, seven young men stood handcuffed in a glass cage in the Moscow City Court while Judge Pyotr Shtunder read out their sentences. One of them smiled; another made an obscene gesture at the television cameras. They had been convicted on December 2 of murdering twenty people across Moscow, most of them migrant workers from Central Asia and the Caucasus, chosen because they did not look Slavic, and of twelve attempted murders. The two leaders, Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, had been seventeen when they killed, and Russian law capped a juvenile's sentence at ten years. That is what each of them received. Ryno himself had claimed at least thirty-seven killings.
Ryno was a student at a school of icon painting in Moscow. With Skachevsky he led a gang of teenage racist skinheads who picked out victims in the street, attacked them in groups with knives, and posted films of some of the attacks on the internet. During the closed-door trial Ryno and Skachevsky said they had been on a mission to "cleanse Russian blood." Another defendant told the court he was a great admirer of Andrei Chikatilo.
The killings ran from 2006 into the spring of 2007. Ryno and Skachevsky were arrested in April 2007 after the murder of Karen Abramian, an Armenian businessman who was stabbed at the entrance to his Moscow apartment building. In May 2007 Ryno pleaded guilty to thirty-seven murders. The court found the gang responsible for twenty, and Ryno personally was convicted in nineteen of them.
The other sentences were heavier than the leaders'. Five other members of the gang, aged between fifteen and twenty-two, received terms ranging from six to twenty years, and two defendants were acquitted, among them a teenage girl who had filmed an attack on a Chinese immigrant. Ryno was sent to a general-security correctional colony. Rights groups called the sentences derisory and said prosecutors were too quick to classify racist attacks as lesser crimes. In May 2009 the British Home Office put Ryno and Skachevsky on the first published list of people barred from entering the United Kingdom for fostering hatred, describing them as leaders of a violent gang that beat migrants and posted films of the attacks online. Ryno, Skachevsky and another member, Roman Kuzin, were later put on trial again for the attempted murders of three Central Asians.
He was released at twenty-seven, in 2017 by most accounts, although one Russian television report puts his release in 2020 after he had served the full ten years. He opened a tattoo studio in central Moscow. In 2020 he met Valentina there; they married that year, and he took her surname, Atman, to start again. They had a daughter. By her account they divorced two years later after he hit her, and the girl stayed with her mother with visits from her father.
In September 2024 Valentina Atman told the Telegram channel Shot that she had gone to collect their four-year-old daughter from kindergarten and been told that her father had already taken her, and that he then stopped answering his phone. Several days later the child was found at the home of Ryno's mother in Pavlovsky Posad and recovered with the help of the police. Atman said she was going to court to keep him away from the girl, and the question of where the child should live was still waiting on psychological assessments. These are her accounts, published as a custody dispute, and no court finding against him arising from them has been reported.