Authorities in the Leningrad region are searching for Andrei Kiiko, known as the “Sosnovo Maniac” or the “Saint Petersburg Maniac,” who disappeared after fleeing from a military hospital where he was recovering from a wound sustained in the war in Ukraine, reports the Russian publication Fontanka, cited by The Moscow Times.
Kiiko had been sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment in a high-security penal colony for a series of crimes, rapes, and attacks committed against women in Sosnovski Park in Saint Petersburg. According to investigators, he had 15 victims, of which 12 survived.
The search operation is being conducted by units of the Russian Ministry of Defense and the regional police in the Lomonosov district.
According to the publication 47news, Kiiko enlisted in the Russian army from prison in the middle of 2024, when he still had about seven years of his sentence to serve. In the autumn of 2025, he escaped from a military hospital in Kronstadt, where he was undergoing a recovery program after being injured on the front.
Sources cited by the publication claim that the Ministry of Defense only officially started looking for him in May 2026. “Until then, his disappearance was kept quiet, and the police were the last to be informed,” they stated.
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