A Russian military court on Thursday sentenced a young soldier to 24 years in prison for shooting dead eight servicemen.

Ramil Shamsutdinov, 22, was arrested in the fall of 2019 on murder charges at a military base where he had served in the closed Far Eastern town of Gorny.

Mr. Shamsutdinov pleaded guilty last year to carrying out the fatal gun attack in 2019 but complained of bullying in the army and a harassment culture he described as “hell”.

A military court in the Siberian city of Chita ruled Thursday to sentence Shamsutdinov to 24 years in a maximum-security penal colony.

The high-profile mass shooting left a stain on the Russian military’s reputation following years of costly reforms that claimed to have stamped out a pervasive culture of hazing left over from the Soviet era.

The Investigative Committee, which probes serious crimes, had earlier concluded that Shamsutdinov was of sound mind and health and understood the gravity of his actions.

Military service is compulsory in Russia for men aged between 18 and 27, but many people use loopholes to evade conscription.

While authorities insist that bullying rituals that plagued the military in the 1990s have been rooted out in the Russian army, rights NGOs maintain that hazing remains a persistent problem.

culled from TVC NEWS