Criminal kingpin Artur Denisultanov killed in the war in Ukraine. He had been accused of an assassination, kidnapping and murder attempts

Artur Denisultanov was last convicted in February 2023: the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow sentenced him to six years in prison for large-scale fraud. As Kommersant newspaper reported, in March 2022 Denisultanov and an accomplice offered to exchange roubles for foreign currency with an employee of a Moscow bank, after which they stole his bag containing 37 million roubles (about $400,000 at the time).

The man left the penal colony for the war. According to leaked civil registry records, Denisultanov died on November 2, 2024, near the town of Selidovo in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. The Kurchaloy District Civil Registry Office in Chechnya registered his death a month later, on December 4.

Denisultanov fought as a private in the 27th Motorised Rifle Division, claims the Ukrainian project “I Want to Live.” According to their data, he died two months earlier than the officially established date of death, on September 2. His dog tag number was AB-760307.

Various publications have referred to Denisultanov as a “St Petersburg bandit” and nicknamed him “Dingo.” He changed his first and last names several times and obtained fake passports: in 2001, he married the sister of businessman Kiyam Kurmakaev and took her last name; in 2008, he changed his name to Tsebro and held documents under the names of Artur Krinari and Alexander Dakar.

Kommersant noted that he was considered “an influential figure in the Russian criminal world” and had several criminal records. According to Ruspres, Artur Denisultanov was first convicted in 1990 by authorities of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic for extortion.

In one of the segments on the program “600 Seconds,” one of the staples of Russian TV in late 1980s and early 1990s, journalist Alexander Nevzorov calls Artur Denisultanov “a representative of a group of St Petersburg Chechens.” The segment details the theft of several cars belonging to them in various districts of St Petersburg. In a conversation with Nevzorov, Denisultanov urges the car thieves to return the cars to prevent “extreme measures” and “settle the conflict.”

In 1998, he and his accomplices attempted to kidnap the director of the Kolpino Food Plant in St Petersburg. However, the car they stopped contained only the businessman’s driver; the kidnappers demanded a ransom of $300,000. Two weeks later, the driver was released for $5,000, and Denisultanov fled to Kharkiv using forged documents.

Ukrainian authorities later extradited him to Russia, where Denisultanov was arrested on charges of fraud, using forged documents, attempting to kill a police officer, and kidnapping. In 1999, Denisultanov was released: his father ransomed a Russian conscript from Chechen captivity and exchanged him for his son.

In the 2000s, Denisultanov was also regularly mentioned in crime reports: for example, in 2002, he was accused of fraud, but the case was later suspended. Later, he was detained in Austria on suspicion of murdering Umar Israilov, a former member of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s security service. After requesting political asylum in Austria, Israilov filed a complaint with the ECHR, alleging torture, executions, and kidnappings in Chechnya. In 2009, unknown assailants shot him dead as he left a store in Vienna. Investigators failed to prove Denisultanov’s involvement in the murder; he was deported to Russia, where he was almost immediately convicted of stealing 7.5 million rubles from an acquaintance.

After being released early in 2017, Denisultanov traveled to Kyiv under the guise of Alex Werner, a journalist for the French newspaper Le Monde, where he met Adam Osmayev, the commander of the Dzhokhar Dudayev Volunteer Battalion, accused of plotting an assassination of Vladimir Putin, and his wife, Amina Okuyeva.

On June 1, 2017, Denisultanov opened fire during a conversation in Osmayev’s car. Okuyeva responded by shooting the attacker four times, but he survived.

In 2019, Denisultanov, who denied all charges, was exchanged for captured Ukrainians. According to Kommersant, before returning to Russia, he “fought for a time” in the militia of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic against Ukraine.