Artur Ryno

Victims

20 convictions, for twenty murders and twelve attempted murders - 37 confessed on arrest and retracted at trial

Years active

August 2006 - April 2007

Location

Moscow, Russia

Method

Stabbing with knife

Status

Confessed to thirty-seven murders on arrest in spring 2007 and retracted that confession at trial. Convicted in December 2008 with Pavel Skachevsky of twenty murders and twelve attempted murders, and sentenced to ten years in a strict-regime colony, the maximum available because he had been seventeen at the time of the offences. Released in 2017. He afterwards took his wife Valentina Atman’s surname and is now known as Artur Atman, and opened a tattoo studio in central Moscow. The couple divorced in 2022. In September 2024 Russian outlets reported that he had taken their daughter from her mother and that police recovered the child four days later at his mother’s home in Pavlovsky Posad; his former wife was reported to be seeking a court order restricting his contact with the child, and the Investigative Committee was reported to be involved. Those reports are allegations and no conviction arising from them has been established.

Artur Ryno was born in 1989 and was studying icon painting at a Moscow art college. He and Pavel Skachevsky, both seventeen, led a group of young men drawn from Moscow's skinhead scene.

Between August 2006 and April 2007 the group attacked people in the street and on the metro across Moscow, stabbing them, choosing victims by appearance: Central Asian migrant workers, people from the Caucasus, and anyone taken to be non-Slavic. Ryno confessed to thirty-seven murders on arrest and said he had done it because he did not like non-Russians. Twenty were formally charged.

They filmed some of the attacks. The killings took place in a period when racially motivated street violence in Russian cities was running at a level the authorities were reluctant to categorise as such, and prosecutors were frequently charging hooliganism rather than incitement or extremism.

Ryno and Skachevsky were convicted in December 2008. Because both had been under eighteen at the time of the offences, the maximum sentence available was ten years, which the court imposed. Eight other members of the group received sentences of between six and twenty years. The disparity between thirty-seven claimed killings and a ten-year term caused substantial public objection in Russia at the time.