Moscow (CNN) - Mikhail Khachaturyan's body was found on a ladder in a Moscow apartment building in July 2018, with dozens of knife wounds to the chest and neck.
A few hours before her death, she had returned from a psychiatric clinic, lined up her three daughters to punish them for the disorder in the department, and sprayed their faces with pepper, according to investigators and the sisters' attorneys. Her oldest daughter, Krestina, who has asthma, passed out.
That was the night the 19-year-old Khachaturyan – Krestina sisters; Angelina, 18, and Maria, 17 - decided to kill their father. They attacked him with a hammer, a knife, and the same can of pepper spray that had been sprayed earlier.
Maria Khachaturyan leaves court on July 28, 2020.
Transcripts of the interrogations leaked to the press and verified to CNN by a lawyer for one of the sisters show that the women tried to inflict injury on themselves to make it appear that their father, who was sleeping at the start of the attack, had first attacked them with a knife. Then they called the police and an ambulance.
The next day, all three were arrested and confessed to the murder, saying they had suffered years of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse by their father, according to their lawyers and the Russian attorney general's office.
Last summer, the sisters were charged with premeditated murder, sparking an uproar among activists in Russia, a country dealing with a far-reaching domestic abuse problem.
The Khachaturyan case quickly became a celebrated cause for human rights groups struggling to pass a law to protect victims of domestic abuse, which was shelved by Parliament in 2016.
After a long and tangled previous investigation, his trial begins in Moscow on Friday. The two older sisters, Krestina and Angelina, will be judged together. Maria, who was a minor at the time of the murder but was charged after her 18th birthday, has been mentally deemed unfit to commit murder and will be tried separately on one count of murder, according to one of the sisters' attorneys. , Aleksey Liptser.
Experts in domestic violence, along with the sisters' defense team, say that in the absence of adequate protection mechanisms within the police and the judicial system, their only option was to defend themselves or eventually die at the hands of their father.
In text messages obtained from her father's phone and posted on Facebook by Liptser, Mikhail Khachaturyan appeared to have threatened to kill and sexually abuse them and their mother.
"I'll hit you for everything, I'll kill you," says an April 2018 text message, accusing them of having sex with a friend. "You are prostitutes and you will die as prostitutes."
The interrogation transcripts also painted a chilling picture of mental, physical, and sexual abuse dating back at least four years before the murder.
"We think they had no other choice. The father drove the girls to despair, his whole life was a continuous hell. They cannot be compared to healthy, calm and balanced people… [the] girls developed serious mental illnesses, including abuse syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder. This was confirmed by all examinations in the case, ”said one of the sisters' attorneys, Aleksey Parshin.
Since last summer, activists have organized dozens of demonstrations in support of the sisters under the "I didn't want to die" campaign, calling on the authorities to reclassify the case around the sisters' self-defense.
Celebrities like former presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak to System of a Down singer Serj Tankian have asked for mercy for the sisters.
A 2019 survey by the independent pollster Levada Center showed that 47% of Russian women and 33% of men felt that the actions of the Khachaturyan sisters were justified.
Angelina (center) and Krestina (back), during a court hearing in Moscow.
A 2019 investigation by Media Zona, a Russian media outlet covering justice and prisons, said that almost 80% of Russian women incarcerated for premeditated murder in 2016-2018 were trying to protect themselves from an abuser.
While Russian lawmakers have kept the domestic violence bill in the background since 2016, they found time to decriminalize some forms of abuse three years ago.
In 2017, under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church and advocates of "traditional values," parliament overwhelmingly passed a bill that became known as the "slap law," which decriminalized the first crime of domestic violence that it does not seriously injure the person, making it a less serious administrative crime.
At first, public pressure seemed to have changed the case of the Khachaturyan sisters.
In January, the prosecutor's office confirmed allegations made by the defense that the Khachaturyan sisters had suffered "beatings, constant humiliation, threats and abuse, physical and sexual violence" and that they had developed a "defensive reaction".
Prosecutors then ordered the Investigation Committee to reclassify the case of premeditated murder to necessary self-defense.
Parshin told the state news agency TASS at the time that the move "essentially means the end of a criminal investigation" against the sisters, who face up to 20 years in prison on the charge of premeditated murder.
But in a surprising change, Viktor Grin, the same prosecutor who recommended that the case be downgraded, confirmed in May that charges of premeditated murder would be imposed against the sisters. No explanation was given for the change.
Mari Davtyan, an attorney for the sisters who often represents victims of domestic abuse, linked the change to a broader trend of dismissing human rights that has been growing since the approval of controversial amendments to the Russian constitution after a referendum on 1st of July.
The referendum, designed to solidify the government of President Vladimir Putin for years to come, was followed by a series of high-profile arrests, such as charges of state treason brought against former journalist Ivan Safronov, or the prosecution of the former governor of Khabarovsk, Sergey Furgal, who was brought to Moscow on multi-year-old murder charges, sparking massive protests in Russia's Far East. Both deny having committed any crime.
"I think it is impossible not to realize what has been happening every day since July 1, 2020, the State has chosen its path," Davtyan wrote on his Facebook page. "And the Khachaturyan case is no exception."
Domestic abuse
