Moscow’s Dorogomilovsky District Court has delivered a verdict in a case involving the theft of assets from the Rus sanatorium in the Moscow region. According to the Prosecutor General’s Office press service, former GRU officer Andrei Chepurnoy was sentenced to 11 years in a penal colony, while former tank serviceman Valery Belyalov received 8 years.
Chepurnoy previously headed the war-disabled veterans’ organization Invalidy Voyny, which объединяет veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and people with military injuries. Belyalov formerly led the veterans’ rehabilitation center Veteran-Rus.
Investigators say that in March 2017 the two men fraudulently obtained ownership of 48 properties that formed part of the Rus medical rehabilitation complex. The prosecution says they then signed an agreement to transfer the sanatorium free of charge to a non-profit organization.
According to the investigation, those actions resulted in the embezzlement of property worth more than 3 billion rubles. That episode formed the basis of the criminal case heard in Moscow.
Chepurnoy and Belyalov were detained in June 2025. After their arrest, a Moscow court placed both men in pretrial detention for the duration of the investigation.
This was not Chepurnoy’s first criminal case connected to state property. In 2019, he was already convicted of embezzlement and received a two-year suspended sentence under Part 4 of Article 160 of the Russian Criminal Code in a case involving theft linked to the Restorative Therapy Center in the Ruza district of the Moscow region.
In that earlier case, investigators alleged that the center’s former director general, Stanislav Brezetsky, transferred 2.2 million rubles in rehabilitation funds at Chepurnoy’s request to renovate the apartment of the wife of a Russian presidential administration employee with whom, according to the case materials, the leader of the Afghanistan veterans’ group was friendly.