Voronezh resident gets 11.5 years for cocaine from Venezuela

The defendants in the criminal case on the supply of cocaine to Russia from Venezuela in February 2024 were found guilty of drug smuggling and trafficking. This was reported by a source of Izvestia in court.

According to the court verdict, the organizers of the delivery, Irina Markina and Andrei Plisko, received 13 and 14 years in prison, respectively. Markina's husband, Alexander, received 12 years in prison for cultivating narcotic plants, which the investigation and the operatives became aware of as part of the development of Markina and Plisko. Antonina Zhuravleva, who confessed to acting as a courier, got off with a term of eight years in prison. And her friend, 60-year-old Olga Stepanova, to whom she put a sealed bottle of rum with a drug in a suitcase, was given 11.5 years in a penal colony. The verdict has not entered into force at the time of publication.

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Only Stepanova completely denied her involvement throughout the entire process. Other participants also testified that she was not involved in the crime and that she was "blindly" used by Antonina's childhood friend.

Zhuravleva and Plisko testified during the investigation that Stepanova had nothing to do with it, and this also follows from an analysis of the negotiations and correspondence between the accomplices. The truthfulness of the testimony was also confirmed with high reliability by polygraph tests conducted by police experts. However, already at the hearing, Zhuravleva changed her testimony regarding the role of Stepanova. She told the court that her friend allegedly knew about the contents of the bottle. After this step, the state prosecution requested a significantly shorter term for Zhuravleva than for her friend — 10.5 and 12 years, respectively. But the court treated the woman who betrayed her friend even more humanely.

Details of the dramatic criminal story can be found in the Izvestia article.

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