On 30 December 2025, Alexei Kuzmin, a United Russia deputy of the Orenburg city council, was detained in Orenburg and then remanded in custody by a court. He was charged with organising the murder of several people.
Immediately after the arrest, the deputy’s party membership was suspended. Nevertheless, Kuzmin currently retains his mandate; no by-election to the Orenburg City Council was called for the single voting day in September.
Over the years, Kuzmin has been involved in business, running construction companies and investment projects. He has been elected to the Orenburg City Council since 2010. In the 2020–2025 convocation, he held the post of deputy chairman of the City Council, sat on the committee for budget, finance and tax policy, and also served on the municipal awards commission. At the end of 2021, Kuzmin became the wealthiest deputy of the city council, with a declared income of 132 million roubles.
“The dead city”
After the collapse of the USSR, the barely started development of the north‑eastern part of Orenburg was frozen. For a long time, because of its location, the area was perceived as a “city on the outskirts”. It was built far from the central part of Orenburg, next to a bypass road, and the first houses stood amid wasteland.
However, active construction resumed here in the 2010s. More and more high‑rise buildings began to appear on the wasteland. Over time, large residential complexes sprang up in the “Dead City”, transport accessibility improved, the number of schools, kindergartens and shops grew, and the district became one of the most densely populated in the city.
Commercial structures controlled by Alexei Kuzmin, among them Remstroy‑Orenburg LLC, were directly involved in developing and building residential blocks in the North‑Eastern District. The deputy personally oversaw the transformation of former wasteland and Soviet unfinished construction projects into inhabited high‑rises. At the same time, Kuzmin was actively engaged in politics, becoming a deputy of the Orenburg City Council, which strengthened his lobbying capacity in the construction market.
Incidentally, the former chair of the Orenburg City Council, Olga Berezneva, who, like Kuzmin, represents United Russia, also comes from the large construction business. Between 2003 and 2011 she served as first deputy head of the List group of companies, which historically was one of the main developers of the “Dead City”, and from 2011 to 2015 she headed the construction firm Rost.
It is noteworthy that following the main elections in September 2025, both the chair of the previous two convocations of the representative body, Olga Berezneva, and her deputy, Alexei Kuzmin, lost their posts and, moreover, did not head any committee.
Redistribution
Alexei Kuzmin is officially charged under a grave article — organising the murder of two or more persons for hire. The investigation links Kuzmin to the case of the notorious Orenburg “gang of hitmen”, whose leader is considered to be the now deceased Alexei Khudaev. The group carried out contract killings of local entrepreneurs and members of their families.
According to the investigation’s version and case materials, the motive for the crimes was business conflicts connected with the redistribution of Orenburg’s construction market, commercial real estate and land plots, a significant portion of which were geographically located in the developing “Dead City”. The main struggle unfolded over the right to complete Soviet unfinished construction projects and over the subsequent management of apartment blocks.
Thus, in June 2014, members of the gang broke into the cottage of entrepreneur Viktor Veselov — the founder of the construction company Stroyalians LLC — strangled him and his wife, and then took the bodies to a forest. The crime was solved only in 2024.
In 2018, the gang of hitmen killed Denis Chernov: the son of the largest Orenburg businessman, the owner and head of the giant Uralelectrostroy LLC, Sergei Chernov. The elder Chernov’s company held the rights to build major infrastructure and electricity‑grid facilities, including in the North‑Eastern residential district, where Remstroy‑Orenburg LLC was simultaneously engaged in construction contracts. The victim of the attack also included Sergei Chernov’s grandson, a seven‑year‑old boy, who received 15 stab wounds. According to operational data, the murder of Chernov’s son and grandson was an act of brutal pressure on the businessman himself as part of the redistribution of his assets, large contracts and land plots.
In May 2019, the director of the Orenburg branch of Gazpromtrans LLC, Andrei Bakharev, and his wife were killed in their own home. The couple’s driver also became a victim. By the nature of his work, Bakharev oversaw the distribution of large contracts, logistics hubs, and the approval of construction projects intersecting with protected zones and transport routes. Companies engaged in civil construction and site preparation (such as Remstroy‑Orenburg) regularly encountered strict regulations and approvals from transport monopolies. The investigation considered disputes over the right to obtain lucrative contracts and access to facilities as one of the key motives for eliminating the top manager.
Overall, the court materials on the gang’s perpetrators showed that its victims were entrepreneurs who refused to surrender business stakes, withdraw lawsuits in court, or give up development rights to commercially attractive land in the North‑Eastern District. When legal methods did not bring the clients the desired result, hired killers stepped in.
The investigation received a powerful boost after the leader of the group of contract‑killers, Alexei Khudaev, was caught in Moscow in December 2025. A few weeks later, Alexei Kuzmin was also detained. Despite the fact that at the end of May 2026 Khudaev took his own life in a cell of the Orenburg pre‑trial detention centre, he had managed to give testimony before his death. The Russian Investigative Committee is currently conducting economic expert analyses, comparing archival arbitration cases of Kuzmin’s firms with the chronology of threats and attacks on Orenburg businesspeople.
The gang: the living and the dead
The gang of Orenburg hitmen working for hire consisted of six people. It included Viktor Bertkholts, Nikita Ignatov and Alexei Khudaev. Later they were joined by Alexander Orshlet, Viktor Belkin and Ivan Kozachkov.
The suspects in the high‑profile murders were detained at the end of May 2020. During the special operation, three — Orshlet, Bertkholts and Ignatov — were detained in Orenburg, while Belkin and Kozachkov, who were 24 and 25 years old at the time, were brought in by operatives from the Novosergievsky District of Orenburg Oblast.
According to the investigation, the gang’s ringleader was Alexei Khudaev — it was he who received the murder orders. He was only apprehended in 2025 in Moscow. All the murders were planned by Viktor Bertkholts. At the trial for the first sentence, his involvement in the murder of eight people was proven, including two homeless people on whom the hitmen practised.
The organised crime group’s leader, Alexei Khudaev, and the perpetrator of the murders, Nikita Ignatov, died in the pre‑trial detention centre. According to the official version, the former took his own life in May 2026, after Alexei Kuzmin had been taken into custody, while the latter died of tuberculosis back in 2021. Viktor Bertkholts was sentenced to life imprisonment. Alexander Orshlet received 18 years in a strict‑regime penal colony.
However, the two remaining gang members, Viktor Belkin and Ivan Kozachkov, are now free. Having received 21 years and 19 years in a strict‑regime penal colony respectively, both hitmen left for the “special military operation” as part of the Wagner PMC, served the required term and safely returned home.
At the same time, the convicts were supposed to pay compensation to the victims’ relatives. However, according to the chief bailiff of Orenburg Oblast, Ruslan Sherstnev, over the entire period, despite payments for participating in the “special military operation”, Viktor Belkin repaid only 2,682 roubles out of a total debt of 4,744,170 roubles. Ivan Kozachkov paid not much more — 96,000 roubles out of a total debt of 3,494,170 roubles.