Anna Boltynyuk, from the Kaluga region of central Russia, lost her 18-year-old daughter Yana when she was raped and murdered in 2014.
Now the man responsible has been freed after serving just three years of his sentence, following a campaign by the Kremlin to persuade convicts to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine in exchange for a presidential pardon.
The murderer, Evgeny Tatarintsev, disappeared last year from a prison colony reportedly visited in person by Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in his drive to recruit men to join the paramilitary group. Boltynyuk made numerous appeals to the federal prison system to find out where he was, and was finally told he had been pardoned.