On June 29, 2004, investigative reporter Maksim Maksimov, 40, disappeared after going to meet a source in downtown St. Petersburg. More than 20 years later, his remains were found in a nearby forest in the village of Beloostrov on December 25, 2024, following the confession of one of his killers, former police colonel Mikhail Smirnov.
Smirnov confessed to federal investigators after being arrested in June 2024 on separate charges of killing a businessman.
Maksimov, a special correspondent with the St. Petersburg weekly magazine Gorod, was investigating Smirnov, then-deputy head of the corruption division in the St. Petersburg branch of the Interior Ministry, for corruption at the time of his disappearance in 2004.
Smirnov said in his December 18, 2024, confession that he asked local journalist Andrei Isaev to meet Maksimov in Furshtatskaya Street, according to Fontanka news outlet. When the journalist arrived at the basement sauna, four men were waiting: Smirnov, Ministry of Interior employee Lev Pyatov, and two local convicts Rustam Meshcherov and Vladimir Meliksetov, Fontanka said.
“I killed [him] together with Meliksetov. First, we stunned him with a blow on the head with a pipe, then we … strangled him,” Smirnov confessed, according to Fontanka. Smirnov also told the prosecutors where the journalist’s body was buried and authorities began excavating his remains the next day.
After Maksimov’s remains were found and identified with a DNA test on December 25, Russia’s Investigative Committee, a federal body in charge of investigating crimes, stated that the motive for the killing was “the journalist’s professional activity in covering the facts of illegal actions of law enforcement agencies.”
In the weeks following Maksimov’s disappearance, police found his car intact near a St. Petersburg hotel, and his mobile phone, without its SIM card, resurfaced at a local market. In July 2004, a criminal case over his disappearance was opened due to public outcry.
During subsequent years, investigations were marred by evidence being lost and a failure to interview witnesses. Maksimov’s former colleague at the Agency for Journalistic Investigations Yevgeny Vyshenkov told CPJ that he and his staff interviewed a witness and an assailant in 2005 who said Maksimov had been murdered and persuaded them to tell their story to prosecutors, but no one was charged.
In June 2005, investigators detained Smirnov, and his police colleagues Pyatov and Andrey Bochurov on unrelated forgery charges, and went on to name the three men as suspects in Maksimov’s disappearance, Russian media reported. But in 2007, the jurors acquitted the three men because of lack of evidence.
CPJ has long advocated for justice for Maksimova, including with his mother, Rimma, up until her death in 2014.
In 2006, a St. Petersburg court declared Maksimov dead at the family’s behest. But Rimma Maksimova’s phone calls, meetings with St. Petersburg officials, and efforts to review the file for her son’s case, which was suspended, proved fruitless.
A.V. Zaitsev, a senior official with the regional investigative committee, told CPJ in a written statement in 2009 that his staff had checked whether Interior Ministry officers were involved in the crime, but did not elaborate.
In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights found that Russian authorities had failed to effectively investigate Maksimov’s disappearance.
After confessing to Maksimov’s murder in 2024, Smirnov said he would like to serve in Ukraine and have his criminal record expunged in exchange for military service, Fontanka reported, without providing further details.
By this time, one of the killers, Meliksetov, had died, leaving Meshcherov and Pyatov to serve as witnesses, although they could not be prosecuted for covering up the murder as the statute of limitations had expired, news reports said.
CPJ contacted Russia’s Investigative committee via email to ask whether Smirnov, Meshcherov, and Pyatov would face trial for their involvement in Maksmiov’s murder but did not receive any replies.