Viktor Sayenko was 19 when he was arrested in Dnipropetrovsk, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine, on July 23, 2007. Police held him and his childhood friend Igor Suprunyuck as suspects in a series of killings in which men, women, teenagers and pensioners had been struck on the head with hammers or metal bars, most of them at random, over about a month. A third classmate, Oleksandr Hanzha, was also detained. The next day Ukraine's deputy interior minister told reporters in Kyiv that the three had admitted 19 murders.
In February 2009 the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal, sitting as the trial court, sentenced Sayenko and Suprunyuck to life imprisonment. By then both denied the killings. Reports of the verdict differ on how many murders the court attributed to Sayenko himself: a 2026 review of the case gives 18, citing the verdict, while one 2009 broadcast report said he was found guilty of killing 21 people. Hanzha was convicted only of robbery and was sentenced to nine years. The Supreme Court of Ukraine upheld the life sentences in November 2009.
Sayenko grew up in Krasny Kamen, a neighborhood of Dnipropetrovsk that Ukrainian-language reports call Chervonyi Kamin. He, Suprunyuck and Hanzha had been friends since childhood, Gazeta.ua reported a week after the arrests, and the three were in the same class at the city's School No. 96 until the eighth grade. The deputy interior minister, Mykola Kupianskiy, said they had attended the same class at one school.
Little about his family has been reported reliably, and much of what circulated in 2007 was rumor. In the first days after the arrests, Ukrainian papers repeated talk that the young men came from prominent local families, with one father said to work for a district prosecutor and one mother for a district council. Gazeta.ua printed the rumor but did not say which suspect it concerned, and Kupianskiy said only that the three came from ordinary families whose parents were well off and respected. A Gorod.dp.ua report of July 30, 2007, said the regional police had described the suspects' families wrongly: Sayenko's parents, it said, were communications engineers at a production enterprise, not officials.
The same report quoted a classmate who recalled that in the fifth grade the boys had thrown stones at the windows of trains, and that after police contacted the families, Sayenko's parents paid for the damage. Sayenko's father told the paper that his son had once bought a bicycle from Suprunyuck for 100 hryvnias without knowing it was stolen, and that he had forgiven his friend.
After school, Sayenko studied by correspondence at an institute, the report said, and worked as a security guard for a private firm. UNIAN, reporting Kupianskiy's briefing, said that one of the three worked as a guard and the other two were unemployed. In a 2008 interview his father said Viktor worked shifts as a guard at a store, saved his wages to buy a car, spent time with his girlfriend at the beach and played computer games with friends. Gazeta.ua reported in 2007 that each of the three had a car of his own.
Most accounts treat Suprunyuck as the leader. Obozrevatel, reporting the end of the investigation in April 2008, named him as the head of the group. The classmate quoted by Gorod.dp.ua in 2007 said that Suprunyuck had harmed animals and that Sayenko and Hanzha had backed him in that as in everything else. Asked whether they had taken part, he said he thought so. Cruelty to animals later appeared among the charges against both Suprunyuck and Sayenko, and the 2009 verdict, as Podrobnosti reported it, found both guilty of it. The reports give no further detail of that charge.
The same 2007 report recorded a remark by a young woman who knew Suprunyuck: that the young men had said more than once that they would get rich once they had killed forty people. She thought they were joking, the paper said. Nothing reported showed the remark to be more than talk.
The killings that police tied to the group began in late June 2007. Gazeta.ua reported that the first known victim was a woman of 33, found on June 26 in the Kommunar neighborhood, and that a man of 35 was found dead about two hours later nearby, killed the same way. Fakty later described the first night as two killings in Krasny Kamen: a homeless man with a criminal record and a young woman who worked for a commercial firm. UNIAN, citing the police, said the series had been under way since June 24.
Gorod.dp.ua dates the killing of Kateryna Ilchenko, whom Russian-language reports call Yekaterina, to June 26, 2007. Her mother, Lidia Ilchenko, told Podrobnosti in February 2009 that her daughter had gone out to walk a girl home and never came back. According to Sayenko's own testimony, as Gorod.dp.ua reported it in 2008, he and Suprunyuck had gone out with a hammer, and it was Suprunyuck who struck her.
Over the following weeks the attacks became roughly weekly, some of them in daylight, according to Fakty. Gazeta.ua wrote that bodies were being found almost daily. A woman killed on July 7 is among the cases described in the 2008 coverage of the trial. The victims, Kupianskiy said, ranged from young people to pensioners, employed and unemployed, and the killers did not seem to choose by age or position. Gazeta.ua wrote that most were children, women or pensioners. Police said some of the killings appeared spontaneous. In only some cases were money, valuables or telephones taken, Kupianskiy said, and some of what was taken was later thrown away.
RFE/RL's Ukrainian service, reporting the verdict, said the men had driven along remote roads and offered rides to young people, women and older people before attacking them. Witnesses quoted by Fakty described two short, slim, dark-haired young men of about twenty, fashionably dressed, who moved about in a dark green Daewoo with a taxi sign on the roof and on mopeds taken from victims.
Some of the attacks were photographed or filmed on a mobile phone, police said after the arrests.
More than 2,000 police officers took part in the search, UNIAN reported in July 2007, and Gazeta.ua described them as regional police. The investigators did not say publicly how they found the suspects. A Gorod.dp.ua report, flagging its information as unverified, said police had traced a pawned telephone belonging to a victim. Gazeta.ua said the three had come to notice because they often visited second-hand shops to sell used mobile phones. A 2026 Fraza.ua review says that Sayenko and Suprunyuck tried to sell a victim's phone through a shop that took second-hand goods. Fakty wrote that they were not caught in the act but were found through what it called operational and search measures.
Sayenko and Suprunyuck were detained on July 23, 2007; Hanzha was detained separately. Sayenko's father, in an interview published in May 2008, gave his own account of that day. He said his son had been detained at about two in the afternoon at the store where he worked, and that the staff there could confirm it. Police came to the family's apartment late that evening, he said, and searched it until seven or eight the next morning, taking kitchen cloths, discs and his son's computer. He said he had not been given a copy of the search warrant.
Investigators later said they had recovered bank cards, jewelry, telephones and other belongings of victims, pawn receipts, metal pipes, hammers and brass knuckles, according to Fakty. Podrobnosti reported at the verdict that photographs and video of the attacks had been found on the defendants' computers.
On July 24, 2007, Kupianskiy announced in Kyiv that the three had admitted 19 murders. Gazeta.ua reported that two of them had written confessions almost at once. In what they told investigators, the young men said they came up behind their victims and struck them on the head with a hammer or a piece of steel bar, and that they had recorded some of the attacks on a phone camera. Kupianskiy said investigators could not identify a motive. To him, he said, the killings looked like a form of amusement or a kind of hunt.
By the end of July, Gazeta.ua reported, Sayenko and Suprunyuck were in pre-trial detention, prosecutors had brought charges, and psychologists were working with them. The two would later say they had been forced to confess. After the verdict, RFE/RL reported, the defendants' parents said that investigative steps had been carried out badly and that police had beaten the confessions out of the young men. In 2008 Sayenko's father repeated what he said he had heard from other detainees, that Viktor and Suprunyuck had come out of a temporary holding facility badly beaten. He called it second-hand information. No court is reported to have accepted the claim.
The investigation closed in April 2008. Obozrevatel reported the charges on April 8 and 9. Suprunyuck was charged with 21 premeditated murders with aggravating circumstances, two attempted murders, four armed robberies, cruelty to animals and illegal possession of a firearm, and he did not admit guilt. Sayenko was charged with 18 premeditated murders with aggravating circumstances, three robberies, cruelty to animals and illegal possession of a firearm. He and Hanzha were reported to admit guilt in part. Hanzha's charges were limited to robbery and one other count against a living victim; he was never charged with murder.
According to the defendants' own statements to investigators, Obozrevatel reported, the killings had been committed for gain, to rob the victims. Psychiatric examinations found all three sane, and the case file ran to 39 volumes. Relatives of six victims planned to claim about 100,000 hryvnias each in moral damages. Obozrevatel also reported, citing the prosecutors, that the first murder had taken place on March 3, 2007, on the Dnipropetrovsk to Novomoskovsk highway. Prosecutors said all three faced life imprisonment, and the case was to be sent to the Dnipropetrovsk regional appeal court by April 23.
In April 2008, Sayenko's lawyer at the time challenged the finding that his client was sane and argued that Suprunyuck should be examined by psychiatrists. He also claimed, according to Obozrevatel, which cited the newspaper Segodnya, that Suprunyuck had used threats to force Sayenko to film the attacks. Obozrevatel presented this as the lawyer's allegation; no court finding on it was reported. It was the first sign of a defense that cast Sayenko as the weaker partner of the two.
Sayenko's father became the most public voice of the defense. In a long interview with the Dnipropetrovsk news agency Novy Most, republished by Gorod.dp.ua on May 5, 2008, he said he was "100 percent" certain that his son had killed no one. He said he had not seen Viktor since the arrest and that the investigator had refused his requests for a visit, though the son's lawyer told him Viktor was not being mistreated and was eating normally. Many lawyers had turned the case down, he said; he had been unhappy with the inexperienced lawyer appointed by the police and had since hired one he considered the best in Ukraine.
He said he had made his own inquiries and believed that the real killers had been detained before his son and then released because of their connections. He said Viktor had an alibi for one of the killings and that the police had later changed the date of that killing. He pointed to a photograph in the file that he thought had been altered, and he asked for an independent expert review of the video evidence. He said he had written to the office of Yulia Tymoshenko, then prime minister, without reply. "I am not asking for my son to be acquitted," he told the agency. "I just want the real killers to be found." He described a newer acquaintance of his son's, a man who had worked at a casino, as a suspicious figure and a possible go-between; there is no report that this man was ever investigated.
The agency asked the prosecutor's office about the detentions, and it declined to give details. A Gorod.dp.ua report in September 2008 said that Sayenko's father was acting as his son's public defender at the trial, and that he said he had found a man who had seen the real killers but who feared for his life and would not talk to journalists. The paper also reported that victims' relatives, for their own reasons, accused the prosecutors of protecting some suspects, and that both sides were running their own inquiries.
Sayenko's mother spoke to Gorod.dp.ua soon after the arrest. She said she could not believe her son was capable of such a crime.
The trial opened in the summer of 2008. Sayenko's account of events did not stay fixed. Gorod.dp.ua reported in September 2008 that during the investigation he had named a friend as involved in the killing of the woman who died on July 7, and that the investigator had set that aside, according to the victim's sister. In court, the paper said, Sayenko changed his account again, saying a year after his arrest that "after thinking it over carefully," there had been three of them after all. Sayenko himself said that he had not told the truth earlier, the paper added. The victims' relatives complained that the friend he had named was forgotten at trial and that the judge stopped their lawyer from raising him. The hearing that month was postponed to September 15 so that Sayenko's new lawyer could study the file.
By the time the verdict was read in February 2009, both Sayenko and Suprunyuck denied taking part in the crimes, Gazeta.ua and Podrobnosti reported. Hanzha, by contrast, admitted two offenses, robbery and causing grievous bodily harm, apologized to the victim, who was in the courtroom, and said he had nothing in common with the other two defendants.
The prosecution's case rested in part on material the defendants had made themselves. Obozrevatel reported in April 2008 that investigators said the young men had made two films and that the case file included 19 video cassettes and five photographs taken on the days of the killings, which investigators described as a personal "collection." Fakty later wrote that the file held about 100 photographs and three video segments, and that two of the 19 cassettes showed real episodes filmed by the defendants. At the verdict, Podrobnosti reported, the court cited photographs and videos found on the defendants' computers as proof. Sayenko's lawyer had argued that he filmed only under threat from Suprunyuck. His father had asked for independent expert examination of the video.
The Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal began reading its verdict on February 10, 2009. Because the file ran to 39 volumes, Gazeta.ua reported, citing Interfax-Ukraine, the judge read only half the charges that day. Podrobnosti said Sayenko and Suprunyuck were accused together of 27 crimes, including 21 murders, and Hanzha of two robberies. The prosecution asked for life imprisonment for the two; Hanzha faced up to 14 or 15 years, depending on the report.
On February 11 the court sentenced Sayenko and Suprunyuck to life imprisonment and Hanzha to nine years. According to Podrobnosti, the court called the two men serial killers and found that their main motive was "an aggressive striving to assert themselves at any cost and to overcome their own fear." The broadcaster had reported the day before that the court found the principal motive to be morbid self-affirmation. Both men were also found guilty of robbery and of cruelty to animals.
Representatives of the victims said they were satisfied, Novy Most reported from the courtroom. Representatives of the two convicted men said Sayenko and Suprunyuck denied their guilt, considered the evidence fabricated and would appeal to the Supreme Court. Lidia Ilchenko had told Podrobnosti the evening before that she was certain of their guilt and wanted them to serve life. After the verdict the defendants' parents disputed the result, RFE/RL reported, while prosecutors said guilt had been fully proven.
The published figures do not agree, and the differences matter for Sayenko, whose count was lower than his friend's from the start.
Fraza.ua, in a review of the case published in August 2026, states that the court found Suprunyuck guilty of 21 killings and Sayenko of 18, and it warns that claims that all three men committed the same 21 murders are legally wrong. A companion Fraza.ua article lists 18 proven episodes according to the verdict. Those figures match the April 2008 indictment, which charged Sayenko with 18 murders and Suprunyuck with 21.
Podrobnosti, reporting the verdict on February 11, 2009, described the court's version this way: in 2007 the two men together killed 18 people in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and Suprunyuck killed three more on his own. The same report also said each man was found guilty of the murder of 21 people. Novy Most wrote that the court found the defendants guilty of the murder of 21 people, without separating them.
Other totals appear in other reports. RFE/RL said the three defendants were convicted of almost thirty crimes, including 23 murders, committed in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. Fakty put the group's total at 29 crimes and 21 murders. A 2011 Podrobnosti feature called Kateryna Ilchenko one of the trio's 27 victims, and a 2025 Telegraf article spoke of 22 killed. The early police figure was 19, the number of murders the young men admitted the day after their arrest.
The verdict could be appealed to the Supreme Court of Ukraine within a month, Podrobnosti reported. Sayenko's side said at once that it would appeal. On November 24, 2009, the Supreme Court of Ukraine upheld the life sentences of Sayenko and Suprunyuck, according to Gazeta.ua and Fraza.ua. Fraza.ua adds that earlier in 2009 the Supreme Court had sent the case back on certain procedural questions and that the appeal court reviewed the material again.
The third classmate was never convicted of any killing. He was charged with robbery and an offense against a living victim, admitted robbery and causing grievous bodily harm at trial, and was sentenced to nine years. Fakty wrote that he did not take part in the murders and was convicted of armed robberies. He has since been reported released after serving his sentence. Reports differ on the year: Gazeta.ua gives 2018, and Telegraf, citing the local site crime-ua.com, gives April 2019.
The case also raised questions about the police. RFE/RL reported at the verdict that prosecutors had opened three criminal cases against police officers accused of official negligence. The outcome of those cases was not reported.
In April 2011, in a report marking ten years since Ukraine banned the death penalty, Podrobnosti said that victims' relatives in this case considered life imprisonment too lenient.
As of August 2026 Sayenko was reported to be serving a life sentence. Telegraf wrote in April 2025 that he continued to serve it in various penal institutions. Fraza.ua wrote in August 2026 that there was no reason to believe either man had been released, and that there was no reliable current public information about where Sayenko is held or under what conditions.
In 2024, false reports spread online claiming that Sayenko and Suprunyuck had been released, or had joined the Ukrainian armed forces from prison and deserted with weapons. Telegraf and Fraza.ua both described these claims as fakes. Detector Media, a Ukrainian media watchdog, reported in September 2024 on a version circulated by Russian Telegram channels about armed prisoners from the Dnipropetrovsk region called the "Dnipropetrovsk maniacs." Ukraine's National Police said the men named in that story were not on its wanted list, and the Center for Countering Disinformation said that people convicted of murdering two or more people could not sign a military contract or leave prison under the rules then in force.
The city where the crimes took place was renamed Dnipro in May 2016, when the Verkhovna Rada voted for the change under the decommunization law, Interfax-Ukraine reported.
Proven by final judgment: Sayenko's guilt of murder in the 2007 series, with robbery and cruelty to animals, and his life sentence, upheld by the Supreme Court on November 24, 2009, according to Gazeta.ua and Fraza.ua. The number of murders in his own verdict is reported as 18 or as 21; the 18 figure is the one given by the 2026 review that cites the verdict and the one in the indictment.
Denied by Sayenko: by the time of the verdict he denied all the killings, after confessing in July 2007 and partly admitting the charges in April 2008. He and his family said the confessions were obtained by force. No court is reported to have accepted that claim.
The start of the series: prosecutors, as reported by Obozrevatel, dated the first murder to March 3, 2007, on the Novomoskovsk highway; Gazeta.ua's report of the trial said the crimes were committed from April to July 2007; police at the time of the arrests spoke of a series beginning on June 24. Which of these earlier episodes, if any, appear in Sayenko's own verdict is not stated in the reports.
The motive: the court found a drive for self-affirmation and to overcome fear. Police in 2007 compared the killings to a hunt or an amusement. The defendants' early statements, as reported in April 2008, spoke of robbery. In July 2007 a Dnipropetrovsk paper reported a theory that the young men had been asked by a foreign website owner to make films for sale; it described the claim as unverified, and the 2026 Fraza.ua review calls it a widespread legend that the court did not accept as a motive. The remark about getting rich after forty killings, reported in 2007, was never proven to be more than talk.
The real-killers claim: Sayenko's father said that others, released because of their connections, were the real killers. No evidence supporting the claim was reported, and the courts rejected the defense.
His family background: early rumors that the suspects were the children of officials were contradicted, for Sayenko, by the July 2007 report that his parents were engineers.
Childhood: Sayenko, Igor Suprunyuck and Oleksandr Hanzha grow up together in Krasny Kamen, Dnipropetrovsk, and attend School No. 96.
March 3, 2007: date prosecutors gave, as reported in April 2008, for the first murder in the case, on the Dnipropetrovsk to Novomoskovsk highway.
June 24, 2007: start of the series of killings, according to police at the time of the arrests.
June 26, 2007: Kateryna Ilchenko is killed in Dnipropetrovsk (date as given by Gorod.dp.ua).
June and July 2007: killings in Dnipropetrovsk and the surrounding districts; more than 2,000 police officers join the search.
July 23, 2007: Sayenko and Suprunyuck are detained; Hanzha is detained separately.
July 24, 2007: the deputy interior minister announces that the three have admitted 19 murders.
April 2008: the investigation closes; Sayenko is charged with 18 murders, three robberies, cruelty to animals and illegal possession of a firearm, and is found sane.
May 5, 2008: his father's interview, saying his son killed no one, is published.
Summer 2008: the trial opens in the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal; Sayenko's father acts as his public defender.
September 2008: the hearing is postponed so that his new lawyer can study the file.
February 10, 2009: the court begins reading its verdict.
February 11, 2009: Sayenko and Suprunyuck are sentenced to life imprisonment; Hanzha to nine years for robbery.
November 24, 2009: the Supreme Court of Ukraine upholds the life sentences.
April 2011: victims' relatives tell Podrobnosti that life is too lenient.
May 2016: Dnipropetrovsk is renamed Dnipro.
2018 or 2019: Hanzha is reported released (reports differ on the year).
2024: false online reports claim that Sayenko and Suprunyuck have been freed or have joined the army.
August 2026: Sayenko is reported to be serving his life sentence.