Against Lieutenant Andrey Marchenkov, an assault commander who was pulled out of a pit by his wife, blogger Irina Soroka, in the summer of 2024, a criminal case on bribery has been initiated. This is stated in a letter from the military investigative department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Belgorod garrison, claims telegram channel “Hello, you are a foreign agent”.
According to the letter, the case was opened under Part 5 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation — receiving a large-scale bribe with extortion or by a group of persons.
The applications were submitted by his former colleagues. They claim that the commander systematically extorted money from them, promising to soften the conditions of service for this, in particular, not to send them to the assault.
One of the applicants, Ilya Korotun, ended up in the same “pit” next to Marchenkov in the summer of 2024. His wife, Yana, posted on Instagram a screenshot of the correspondence dated December 2023. The message contains a kind of “price list”:
“Sony PlayStation 5 (with a disk drive and two joysticks), Sony TV (diagonal 65-75), Bork coffee machine, Yandex Alice (large), two cases of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, two of Bacardi rum, one of tequila and four of Martini champagne. And all your questions have been resolved,” the text says.
According to the wives of the servicemen, the soldiers transferred money either personally to Marchenkov or to the card of his wife Irina Soroka, who actively used social networks and covered their life together against the background of the war. Korotun also posted confirmations of bank transfers from her husband to Marchenkov. It was for such actions, she claims, that the commander was placed in a pit.
Another former subordinate of Marchenkov, Vladislav Vorobyov, said in February 2025 on Instagram that his mother had transferred 500 thousand rubles to Soroka’s card, allegedly so that the fighter would not be sent to the assault. But it didn’t help — according to him, only three of the group survived. Vorobyov estimated the total amount collected by the commander from the fighters at more than 20 million rubles.
Before the start of the war, Marchenkov had already been charged — his name was mentioned in an investigation by journalists published in a podcast “Sisters. Love.” According to the case file, he posed as a foreman and deceived residents of a Moscow high-rise building for a large sum. Among the victims are mostly pensioners, who are still trying to recover compensation from him through court appeals.
In the summer of 2024, the name of Marchenkov and his wife got into the news after she practically rescued her husband from a pit for refuseniks while streaming online.
Meanwhile, against the background of service in the war zone, the Marchenkov family purchased a house in the Moscow region and two cars, one of which is an elite Mercedes GLC. The lieutenant himself was presented with the Order of Courage.
