The murderer of Ukrainian teenager Stepan Chubenko, sentenced to life imprisonment in Ukraine, mobilized into the Russian army

In occupied Donetsk, Vadym Pohodin mobilized into the Russian army and ordered the shooting of Stepan Chubenko, a 16-year-old teenager from Kramatorsk. The murder occurred in July 2014. In Ukraine, he and two of his accomplices were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Pohodin reported his mobilization on his page on the Russian social network VKontakte. According to his posts, he mobilized around the end of 2024 and posted a photo of himself in military uniform.

In the comments, he was told that he was getting closer to the governorʼs seat in Lviv, and he replied that "before Lviv he will have an intermediate station in Odesa".

At the end of July 2025, Pohodin was wounded, most likely in the Donetsk region, and underwent surgery in the occupied cities of Bakhmut and Luhansk, as well as in Russia, in the city of Aksai.

In his post, Pohodin notes the decommunized name of the city — Bakhmut, not the old Artemivsk. He wrote to his followers: "There is very little left before Slovyansk."

A few weeks after the injury, in August 2025, he was discharged from the hospital and reported on VKontakte that he was at a temporary deployment point for troops. He indicated the geolocation as occupied Debaltseve in the Donetsk region.

Pohodin has been regularly posting on VKontakte since May 2023, when he was released from a pre-trial detention center in occupied Donetsk and the “Supreme Court of the DPR” began trying him for the murder of Chubenko, which occurred 11 years ago. In his posts on the social network, Pohodin talked about the trial in the “DPR” and that not only he but also his accomplice Maksym Sukhomlynov were on trial.

• At the end of July 2014, Stepan Chubenko was returning home from Kyiv to Kramatorsk by train through occupied Donetsk. He was seized by unknown men with weapons because the teenager had blue-and-yellow ribbons and a scarf of the “Karpaty” football club. He was brutally beaten for a week, and then executed with three shots to the head in a village near Donetsk.
• At that time, more than 20 minors had died in eastern Ukraine as a result of the Russian war. All of them died from shelling, and Stepan Chubenko was tortured.
• The murdered boyʼs parents managed to have the investigation conducted in Kramatorsk and in occupied Donetsk. In the fall of 2017, a Ukrainian court sentenced the teenagerʼs killers to life imprisonment — Vadym Pohodin, Maksym Sukhomlynov, and Yuriy Moskalyov. At the time of the teenagerʼs execution, all of them were citizens of Ukraine and members of the illegal military formation "Kerch". Their trial was held in absentia, as the killers were hiding in occupied Crimea and Russia.
• In the occupied territory, Moskalyov was detained in 2015 and sentenced to 16 months in prison because he convinced a "DPR judge" that he had not shot but had watched the execution. In 2023, the "DPR" reported that Pohodin had been detained in Donetsk and Sukhomlinov in Crimea, they were taken to the Donetsk pre-trial detention center and put on trial.

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