Russia’s Convicted Murderers—Satanists—Are Fighting in the Kremlin’s ‘Holy War’ Against Ukraine

During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has persistently declared their war as a crusade against “Nazi-ism,” portraying Ukraine as a “terrorist state”. As Ukraine continued to defend against Russian forces, the Kremlin sought to redefine its goals for the invasion by claiming to fight against “Satanism and Satanists,” hailing their leader, Vladimir Putin, as "chief exorcist.”

Putin dubbed the West as "satanic" who rejected "moral norms,” claiming that, unlike Russia, it had turned away from “traditional” and "religious" values. 

Putin’s characterization of so-called Western values as “outright Satanism” in a speech during the “annexation ceremony” on September 30, 2022, propelled this accusation into an official narrative. The Kremlin then added “holy crusade” to its list of false justifications for waging a brutal war and committing atrocities against the people of Ukraine.

US-sanctioned Ramzan Kadyrov, a Russian politician and current Head of the Chechen Republic, has repeatedly proclaimed that Russia is fighting a holy war in Ukraine against the “army of the Antichrist” and “Satanic LGBT values.”

A proposal to ban Satanism in Russia and recognize it as an "extremist movement" was put forward in the State Duma in July of 2024. In January 2025,  the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, announced that he supports a ban on Satanism in Russia, and for it to be declared an “extremist movement.”

"In the area of ​​a special military operation , on the line of fire, our soldiers are ready to give their lives for values ​​that are clearly trampled upon by Satanists,” Kirill said. 

However, it’s Russia who has a thriving subculture of “Satanism.” Moreover, Russia’s Satanists are taking up arms, pardoned from brutal murder and cannibalistic crimes, to fight for Russia in their illegal invasion of Ukraine. 

The convicts can atone for their crimes on the battlefield with blood.

The Kremlin

Russia’s Satanists at war with Ukraine

A Russian Satanist, murderer, and cannibal, Nikolai Ogolobyak, was released from prison to fight Russia’s war against Ukraine. In 2008, Ogolobyak and seven accomplices brutally murdered four teenagers in a Satanic ritual before dismembering and eating their corpses. They killed two of them and cut off their heads, removed the hearts and tongues, fried and ate them, according to reports citing case materials.

In 2010, the courts found them guilty, giving Ogolobyak a 20-year sentence of which he served 15, including two years in a pre-trial detention center. He then filed a motion to participate in Russia's war on Ukraine where he was wounded and pardoned after just 6 months of fighting. On November 21, 2023, Ogolobyak, 33, returned from the battlefield in Ukraine to his hometown of Yaroslavl, Russia.

Ogolobyank and his accomplices had many admirers, thus forming a Satanic branch of “the Church of Darkness (CD)” in the Yaroslavl area. The CD branch considers itself part of the international occult group “Order of the Nine Angles ONA ,” according to reporters at Fontanka, a Russian news agency.Since the 2008 murders, their followers have “expressed ideas of human sacrifice and terror in the name of Satan” and have since committed murders in Moscow, according to Fontanka.

Denis Gorin from a Russian coastal town Aniva was sentenced in 2003 to 22 years in a special-regime colony for murder after he stabbed a man to death and ate his flesh after killing him. According to reports, he killed at least four people. In 2010 he was released on parole and in 2023, Gorin posted a photo of himself on social media wearing a military uniform, the Sakhalin Against War Telegram channel posted.

Russia’s Satanists in society 

Satanism is found worldwide, but there are dozens of brutal cases in modern Russia of murder.

Moscow-born Andrei Tregubenko, and Olga Bolsakova from Balashikha, a city in the Moscow region, lured a girl into a forest and murdered her, in what has been described as “Satanic rituals” in 2016. According to reports, Tregubenko and Bolsakova met through the CD branch and later were living together when the first murder happened. Two months later, they and two others, Tatiana Deryugina and Alexander Perevozchikov-Khmury lured a man into a forest and killed him. Later, Tregubenko also stabbed a man to death in an apartment in Moscow and the others performed a satanic ritual in the victim's blood. 

They were part of the aforementioned Satanic branch from Yaroslavl. Their Satanism was inspired by the killings conducted by Ogolobyak and his accomplices. Ogolobyak, the Satanist who then went on to fight against Ukraine, now returned to Yaroslavl.

“Semyon”, a Satanist and supporter of Nazi ideology, is suspected of raping a 14-year-old girl over a year and was arrested in 2024. He called Hitler a hero of a new religion and called for the radical destruction of officials, a revolution to establish the power of Satanists, and the subsequent enslavement of humanity, according to Russian media reports.

A Russian family and self-proclaimed Satanists called their son Lucifer and their second son “Lestat”, after a fictional vampire character “The Vampire Chronicles” in a bid to “create a small army of darkness.” 

In 1998, 18-year-old Satanist Andrei Chibisov was sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing his girlfriend, who had refused to perform a Satanic ritual. In 1999, members of a Satanic sect were detained in Saint Petersburg in connection with the murder of 12 people. In 2006, a murder committed by two devil worshippers was solved in Pavlovsky Posad near Moscow, The Insider, a Russia-focused, independent media outlet reported. 

What is Satanism?

There are a wide range of Satanist groups ranging from neo-Nazis to civil activists. Modern Russian historiography has no single universally accepted classification of Satanism, and the perception of Satan differs amongst groups. Satanism is not a single religion, but a vast collection of cults, beliefs, and philosophical systems.

Satanism, in its simplest form, can be classified into two types, "youth" and "rationalistic" proposed by Vladimir Martinovich, a Belarusian expert in religious study. 

Youth Satanism “is practiced by people aged from 13 to 25 years and is understood as a symbol of rebellion against any government. It is youth Satanism that is responsible for setting fire to churches, desecrating cemeteries, and killing animals and people” Vladimir Martinovich said. Rationalistic Satanism Martinovich desribes as “the God of rational Satanism is the Satanist himself, who does not recognize any other authorities except itself”.described

It’s difficult to measure their popularity in numbers, as many share their ideologies only within their Satanic community. However, in just ten Satanic community groups reviewed on Russian social media, VKontakte, more than 23,000 people are practicing Satanism in Russia, Research conducted by Universidade Federal da Paraíba published in their report “Manifestation of Satanism.”

The Insider reported that Roman Krylov, a religious scholar, described Satanist groups as “heterogeneous; there are also many loners whose faith is very personal. Some groups have a leader or a guru – like the one with (Russian Satanist) George Gurdjieff . But most Satanists love individualism, so we can't say there is a clear structure that is the same for everyone.”

The first Satanist communities emerged in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century in Saint Petersburg, the investigative outlet The Insider reported. In the Soviet Union, the earliest Satanist groups appeared in the early 1970s in Moscow and Leningrad.

The Satanic Church of Russia has existed since 2013, but received legal recognition on May 10, 2016 — a date they subsequently declared “the day of Russian Satanism”, The Moscow Times reported. 

“Neo-Nazism and Satanism are also partly connected, but more psychologically,” said Krylov, as reported by The Insider. “After World War II, extreme forms of nationalism were banned in Europe. At the same time, the previously popular themes — the greatness of the white race and so on — were pushed off the agenda. As a kind of psychological compensation, people who had previously been attracted to these ideas chose the cult of a particular adversary of God. For such people, Satanism and esotericism proved to be a psychological outlet.”

However, not all Satanic communities are aligned with Nazism. The Insider spoke to various groups of Satanic communities, many opposing Russia’s war in Ukraine, some “who preach pacifism and veganism, who love art and prefer not to advertise their religious views, wishing everyone just left them be.”

The Kremlin’s efforts to demonize progressive communities and Ukrainians as “Satanists”

The proposal to ban Satanism in Russia and recognize it as an "extremist movement" was chaired by Vladimir Shamanov, retired Colonel-General of the Russian Armed Forces. The so-called “military butcher” is a former Russian commander during the two Russian wars in Chechnya, known for his brutality towards civilians. 

At the meeting, a list of “extremist” organizations was created, including those of the LGBT+ community, abortion rights advocates, and members of the Azov Battalion of the Ukrainian armed forces.

“The devil is everywhere, especially on the Ukrainian front,” Russia’s MP  for the United Russia party, Olga Timofeeva, stressed at the State Duma meeting.

“Russia is at war with an anti-religious civilization that fights God and overthrows the very foundations of spiritual and moral values: God, the Church, the family, gender, man… The modern West has abolished all this, replacing it with virtual reality, extreme individualism, the destruction of gender, universal surveillance, a totalitarian 'abolition culture', a post-truth society” The Russian Embassy in Bangladesh posted on Facebook, along with the below illustration.

The Russian government added The Satanic Temple, an American religious group, to its list of “undesirable” organizations in December 2024. The Satanic Temple actively advocates for progressive causes, including the rights of women, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, and individuals undergoing drug rehabilitation programs. 

“The Satanic Temple actively supports participants of extremist and terrorist movements, speaks negatively about the special military operation [and] calls for the overthrow of the constitutional order in Russia,” the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia said, adding that the organization’s website contained information on “fundraising for the Armed Forces of Ukraine”.

Moscow seems to pick and choose its definition of “Satanism”—pardoning hardcore criminals and self-proclaimed Satanists while smearing progressive communities with the Satanic brush.

Russia continues to face devastating losses on the battlefield, in soldiers, in military equipment, and in global public opinion. The Kremlin seeks a winning narrative for their invasion, “each one more absurd than the one before it,” the US Embassy and Consulates of China stated in a report. 

It seems to me that the values for which many Russian soldiers kill and sacrifice themselves are, in fact, quite familiar to Satanists.

Igor Prekup

Priest of the Estonian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate

Igor Prekup, a priest of the Estonian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate told the Russian news outlet Meduza: “You might ask about the so-called ‘values’ that Kirill claims Russian soldiers are defending in Ukraine. Undoubtedly, some fight out of ideological conviction, but many do it for money and the advantages it brings. Criminals fight for the chance, if they survive, to escape their sentences. For this, they go to kill people — many of whom would never have picked up a weapon under other circumstances. It seems to me that the values for which many Russian soldiers kill and sacrifice themselves are, in fact, quite familiar to Satanists.” 

“The Kremlin’s efforts to demonize Ukrainians as ‘Satanists’ is simply a thinly veiled attempt to explain its losses to the people of Russia and justify more in advance. Seemingly irrelevant on the surface, the ‘desatanization’ narrative dehumanizes the people of Ukraine and attempts to justify depravity and cruel atrocities against them,” the US Embassy and Consulates of China stated.