They now have a
Wiki page.
The man in the video-
The victim in the video
The man whose brutal murder is recorded in the leaked video was identified as Sergei Yatzenko from the village of Taromskoye. His murder took place on the 12th of July 2007, and his body was found on the 16th.
Yatzenko was 48 years old. He had recently been forced into retirement due to a cancer tumor in his throat. Treatment left him unable to speak for some time, but Yatzenko was unhappy with being unable to work and continued to find odd jobs around the village. He took on small construction projects, fixed cars, weaved baskets, and cooked for his family. He was just beginning to regain his voice by the time of the murder. Yatzenko was married and had two sons and one grandchild. He also had a disabled mother which he took care of.
Yatzenko had had another brush with death 16 years earlier. While working at a farm, he lost control of his tractor and rolled downhill into a river. Instead of jumping out, he stayed in the cabin trying to save his vehicle, and ended up being pinned underwater. By the time he was extracted, Yatzenko was clinically dead. He was however eventually resuscitated. Doctors called his survival "one in a thousand".
At around 2:30 PM on the day of the murder, he called his wife to let her know he was riding his old Dnepr motorcycle to see his grandchild. However he never made it to his son's house, and his cell phone was turned off by 6 PM. His wife Lyudmila called a friend and walked around the village, afraid that her husband might have fallen ill or had a motorcycle accident. They were unable to locate any signs of him. They were also unable to file a missing person's report, since in the Ukraine a person can be declared missing at least 72 hours after last being seen. The next day Lyudmila posted photographs of her husband around the village, and enlisted more local help to search the surrounding area. Finally, four days later, a local who saw one of Lyudmila's posters remembered that he had seen an abandoned Dnepr bike in a remote wooded area by a garbage dump. He took Yatzenko's relatives to the scene, where they discovered his mutilated decomposing body.
The fact that Yatzenko's murder was videotaped was unknown to the public until a court session on October 29, 2008. The full unedited video of the murder was shown as part of a large presentation by the prosecution, causing shock in the audience. The court agreed with the prosecution that the video was genuine, and that it showed Igor Suprunyuck attacking the victim, and that Viktor Sayenko was the man behind the camera.
The Yatzenko murder video was leaked to the internet some time around early December of 2008.
Apparently the trial will continue again in March.