Siberian Woman Fights for Justice After House Arson
Ksenia, a resident of the Geologov settlement near Novosibirsk, has spent half a year trying to get the police to find out who is guilty of setting her house on fire. At first, it was thought to be a short circuit, but traces of oil were found at the scene, and a security camera captured the perpetrator himself. The owner of the burned house and a friend suspect a neighbor may be involved. NGS observer Ilya Kalinin investigated what is known about the incident and the neighborly conflict, and why the case was closed and reopened.
The Nighttime Arson
In July 2025, a fire broke out in the private house of Ksenia K., who lives in the Geologov settlement with her two children. Ksenia, the children, and a family friend, Konstantin Zh., were in the Altai region at the time.
«No one knew we had left for Altai. Only my dad and a friend. Even my car was parked near the house. We left unexpectedly,» the woman says with tears in her voice.
She admitted it is still difficult for her to talk about the topic: during the fire, her beloved cat died, and the stress of everything that happened caused her to miscarry — she lost her baby. Therefore, Konstantin Zh. told the story related to the incident and the events that the victims believe may be connected to it. The man has been fully immersed in all events throughout this time.
The house caught fire on 25 July around 3 a.m. Ksenia only found out about the fire in the morning. The vacationers immediately drove back. On the way, Konstantin remembered there was a security camera in the house. The man called his son and asked him, if the flash drive was not damaged, to retrieve it and review the video from that ill-fated night.
At first, firefighters decided the cause of the fire was a short circuit. The broken window on the first floor, they said, could have cracked from the heat. But Konstantin«s son, who was also at the scene, noticed that Ksenia»s car was splashed with an oily liquid, and matches were lying nearby. Then they suspected it was arson.
«My son also went and, in that charred blackness, found the camera and the flash drive. And he took it to be decrypted,» said Konstantin.
In the video, a man walked cautiously past the camera, pouring something around. The perpetrator went up to the second floor, then came back down and, sneaking on bent legs, walked past the camera again. After a while, flames flared up in the hall where the camera stood, and then the second floor caught fire. The video is not being published in the interests of the investigation.
As a result, the entire first floor of the house and most of the second floor burned out from the inside.
During the inspection of the property, foreign footprints were discovered near a hole in the fence at the back of the yard: someone had walked here and left through the backyard.
The police immediately opened a criminal case on arson. But then, Konstantin says, silence fell: they couldn«t get information from anyone about how the investigation was proceeding. The police told them to call the investigator, but no one answered the phone calls. More than three months passed like this, and Ksenia began to complain to the prosecutor»s office and the Investigative Committee (SK).
Unauthorized Structure
Ksenia suggests the arson may be linked to quarrels with a neighbor: he appeared here several years ago and regularly started conflicts over various issues.
For example, Konstantin says, once a car belonging to one of the neighbor«s acquaintances damaged a water column near Ksenia»s house. Another time, the neighbor wanted to connect to the well column but was not allowed to.
«She invested money, installed the water supply, and at some point the neighbor decided to connect to it without permission. I saw this, came out, and the conflict escalated seriously: they started threatening me, his buddies lined up — about ten to fifteen people,» Konstantin noted.
Konstantin also believes the neighbor and his friend have designs on the land plot where the garage of Ksenia«s late husband stands. The garage is on municipal land; the woman was asked to demolish it (a lawsuit is ongoing over this), and then the authorities decided to lease the land.
«I inherited it (the structure) after my husband»s death in 2020, but the garage was built even before I appeared in my husband«s life,» explains Ksenia, stating why she didn«t know anything about it before.
The neighbor«s friend applied to lease it, and Ksenia did too, but she was refused because she applied later. NGS has copies of documents demonstrating the claims of both parties to the plot.
Konstantin noted that Ksenia«s neighbor had previously bought his own plot through an acquaintance and then registered it in his name. The neighbor himself, in a conversation with NGS, confirmed that he did buy one land plot through an acquaintance and later re-registered it in his name because he didn»t have free money at the time. But regarding the plot with the garage, the neighbor assured he had no interest. His friend declined to comment on the situation.
The neighbor also assured that his conflict with Ksenia was only about access to the water point.
«What conflicts could I have? That»s a lie! Some nonsense... I had no personal conflicts with her, honestly. I just told them: let«s not greet each other,» the man described his relationship with the neighbors.
Regarding the fire in the house across the way, which burned until morning, the neighbor said he didn«t see anything.
«I was at home, asleep. Nothing was visible. On the video [from my security cameras] you can see nothing is visible... They (the police) came, looked, asked me to write a note saying I had nothing to do with it. Well, I wrote that I had nothing to do with it,» the man said.
Investigation Continues
In response to an NGS inquiry, the police reported that the preliminary investigation into the case is not yet complete.
«Additional information on the criminal case cannot be provided due to the inadmissibility of disclosing pre-trial investigation data,» the response to the journalistic inquiry stated.
In addition to the official response, police explained that there is a procedure: two months after a case is opened, it is terminated, and later resumed. «It really is terminated only to go through this procedure, and the investigation continues further,» police informally explained to the journalist, assuring that the case is being investigated.
At the very end of 2025, responses came to Ksenia«s complaints about the lack of progress on the arson, stating that the investigation of the criminal case had indeed been stopped, but after the complaint — it was resumed.
«During the verification of the arguments indicated in the appeal, significant violations of criminal procedural legislation in the conduct of the preliminary investigation were identified... The head of the 10th department for crime investigation <...> has been issued a demand to eliminate the indicated violations,» was written in the response to Ksenia, signed by Yevgeny Goncharov, the prosecutor of the Sovetsky District.
At the end of January, NGS reported on the completion of work on the case of an attempt on the life of a large-family resident of the Kupinsky District and her three daughters. The door of the woman«s private house, where she was sleeping with her children, was doused with gasoline and set on fire.
