“Lilia’s in prison and Sergei’s in the morgue”: the Russian Vogue model jailed for 7 years for killing her husband
Family and friends say Lilia Sudakova suffered years of domestic violence. Her lawyer says she was acting in self-defence and is appealing the verdict.
By Amalia Zatari.
“Sit down somewhere, Irena. I have bad news.”
The call from Irena Sudakova’s ex-husband came at the end of November 2020. Irena knew immediately it was about their daughter Lilia, an international model whose husband Sergei was a violent alcoholic.
“‘Lilia’s at the police station and Sergei’s in the morgue. He’s dead,’” Irena remembers her ex-husband saying. “And I started sliding down the wall,” she added.
Lilia hadn’t planned any of this, Irena says. Not the killing. Not prison. Not even the modelling career.
In 2012, seventeen-year-old Lilia Sudakova had been studying tourism and hospitality at a college in Serpukhova, a near Moscow suburb, when a friend secretly sent her picture to three modelling agencies.
“All three replied. They all wanted to know who this girl was,” Irena told the BBC. The next thing she knew there was a photographer and makeup artist in their apartment. Lilia signed with a Moscow agency and, without telling Irena, soon quit college altogether.
“I got very angry. But she said, ‘Mum, how am I going to mix my studies with work?’” Irena said.
Success came fast. Lilia got her first passport when she was 19, and was sent for a shoot in China. She modelled for Russian Vogue, became the face of several famous brands and travelled to Paris, Milan, Beirut, Hong Kong and – her favourite – Tokyo.
“The boy in a plaid shirt”
Lilia was 21 when she met Sergei Popov in a crowded train carriage and agreed to meet up later that day.
“I was with a friend, taking photos of her while we had a picnic on a rooftop. He had some nerve – he got there drunk, said he was an alcoholic, and started criticising what we were doing,” Lilia said in a 2021 interview.
Lilia didn’t believe he had a problem with alcohol. “He looked like a 19-year-old kid in a plaid shirt. When someone like that tells you he’s an alcoholic, you’re like, ‘Ha ha ha,’” she said in the 2021 interview.
Two weeks later, Lilia told her mum about him. “She said she’d met a really interesting guy. That he was very clever, well-read and erudite,” Irena said.
After a month, she moved in with Sergei and his older sister. For the first few years, the couple mainly lived off Lilia’s modelling income – Sergei, who was a couple of years older, never lasted long in any job.
Irena noticed her daughter becoming more secretive. “I realised then he had started to restrict her relationships with other people, even with close family,” she said.
After starting to date Sergei, Lilia “disappeared a little,” her friend Natalya told the BBC. He was a “strange, unusual person,” she said. “I got the feeling he was someone who was always toying with people, winding them up..”
Irena admits she found him charming, a sparkling talker, albeit arrogant and often critical of others. “He truly was erudite and well-read. It seemed like he could have a conversation about anything. His way of speaking, the way he held himself, it made many women drop their guard. He really wasn’t lacking in charm – and that’s what’s scary,” she said.
“Mum, Sergei strangled me”
Late one night, about a month after Lilia moved in with Sergei, Irena got a call from her. “She was sobbing – not crying, but sobbing – and said, ‘Mum, Sergei strangled me.’”
Lilia told her mum she was going to stay with someone in Moscow and ran out into the night, forgetting her phone and wallet. Irena didn’t hear from her until after 1am. “She called and said, ‘Mum, everything’s ok.’ It turned out Sergei found her on the platform and they made up. So the first sign of violence was literally two months after they met.”
Every time Irena tried to convince her to leave Sergei, Lilia would “immediately close up and say, ‘Mum, we’ll figure it out,’” Irena said. She explained that Sergei was going through a lot – his mother and brother both died just before she met him. “Lilia is a smart girl and I trusted her,” Irena said.
A few months later, in autumn 2016, the couple moved to St Petersburg and quietly got married in the new year. They tied the knot so fast, a friend later told Irena, after an incident where Sergei was arrested when drunk and the cops paid Lilia little heed. “Who are you? What’s your relationship with him?” they asked her, according to Irena. “After that, they got married so that if something happened, she’d be his wife.”
Natalia once saw Lilia turn up to a shoot with bruises on her neck, but Irena didn’t hear her daughter discuss Sergei’s violence again until seeing it for herself in 2019. The couple were at Irena’s apartment preparing for a trip to Thailand. Lilia went to bed around 1am and asked her mum to wake her at 7am. Irena got up the next morning to find Sergei awake in the kitchen, surrounded by empty beer bottles. He insisted he was fine to travel and walked into his bedroom.
Five minutes later, Irena heard her daughter shout: “Mum, help!”
She heard Sergei shout, “Take this!” and found him undressing, paying no attention to his mother-in-law frozen behind him. He threw his sweater at Lilia, then his trousers and underwear, and finally he tried to shove his socks into his wife’s mouth. “I had been standing there in a stupor, but that moment I came to my senses and pushed him away from my daughter,” Irena said.
Sergei threw a coat onto his naked body and went out into the street, while Lilia silently got her things together. “I realised she was ashamed that I’d seen everything,” Irena said. “I told her, ‘Lil, we have to call the police.’ She replied, ‘Mum, I’ve got a contract, they’re waiting for me’” in Thailand. Sergei came back, slightly sobered after a walk in the cold, and they went to Thailand together.
Lilia tried to leave Sergei that year, but it didn’t last. “He said he couldn’t live without Lilia. A friend called her and told her he was losing his mind without her, he was hanging himself, cutting his wrists. And she went back to him,” Irena said.
“He hated me to death”
In November 2020, Sergei and Lilia moved back to St Petersburg.
“Our relationship was pretty tense at that time. He was pretty often aggressive towards me, he’d insult me and threaten to beat me up. He said he hated me to death, that his hatred for me was so great he could kill me,” Lilia later told her lawyer Olga Karacheva, according to a copy of her testimony seen by the BBC.
They and their friend Alexander rented an apartment, with Lilia and Sergei sleeping in separate rooms. On the night of the 28th of November, Sergei kept demanding she had sex with him, but she refused and went to her room. That night, Sergei came home with a woman named Pelageya, Lilia said in her testimony.
“They were both very drunk. They were lying on the floor in the corridor, laughing, taking each others’ coats off. I told her I was his wife and asked her to stop,” Lilia said.
Not knowing what to do, she went into her room. She was soon joined by Pelageya, whom Sergei pushed inside, saying, “Go talk,” Lilia said in her testimony.
“She cried and complained about her life, saying she had no money,” Lilia told her lawyer. “She said how she met Sergei, that she liked him and she was upset when she learned about me. She said she knew about Sergei’s violence towards me, that he had even told her about it, and she recommended I leave him because he’s a ‘psycho’. She asked if she could stay with me because she didn’t want to sleep with Sergei. I said yes and we hugged.”
Learning that Pelageya was hungry, Lilia took some tomatoes out of the fridge and started making a salad.
“Sergei told me I should cook food for him – I replied that could take care of himself. Pelageya went to my room, saying she wanted to rest. Sergei came to my side of the room and I cried, telling him not to come close to me because I saw he was in a bad state and knew how rough he would be when he was drunk,” Lilia recalled.
He threw a plate at her, which hit Lilia’s hands and then came up and grabbed her by the hair. “He told me to defend myself, to talk back to him. I cried out. He let go of my hair and I slapped him on the face with my hand. He gripped my hand, pulled it behind my back and grabbed my hair with his other hand. Then Alexander came out and pulled Sergei away.”
In his legal testimony, Alexander confirmed Lilia’s recollection of events and said he took Sergei to his room.
“I panicked. I was so scared, I was afraid for my life. I robotically continued cooking and started cutting the tomatoes. The next moment, I heard Sergei and he grabbed me by the shoulder,” Lilia said.
Lilia testified that Sergei turned her round towards him and she had the knife in her hands. She said she instinctively pushed him away with both hands. The knife punctured his chest. After that, Sergei stayed on his feet, Lilia remembered. “He backed away. I didn’t understand what was happening. He said something, got angry and walked towards me. I backed into the corridor.”
Lilia reached the open door of her room and saw Alexander. He said in court that Lilia asked Sergei, “Are you going to kill me now?” Alexander lay Sergei down and said Lilia to ran to a pharmacy.
“I explained the situation in the pharmacy – what the wound was and how drunk he was. They gave me a green peroxide and told me how to stop the bleeding,” she told her lawyer. “In the apartment, I called an ambulance straight away because I saw the state he was in. I lay his head on my knees, stroked him and gave him water.”
“Then the police got there. The officers talked to Alexander and took me away,” Lilia remembered.
Murder or self-defence?
Lilia was arrested and, at first, charged with manslaughter, which carries a sentence of up to 15 years. Then it was reclassified as murder, which is also up to 15 years but has a 6-year minimum.
“Mum, I don’t know what happened – I just wanted to push him away from me. I loved him and still love him. I have to live with this grief,” Irena recalled Lilia saying at one visit.
Lilia spent 11 months in a pre-trial detention centre and then was allowed out on house arrest. In January 2022, they let her begin leaving the house, with various restrictions.
Her lawyer, Olga Karacheva, told the BBC they were pushing for a charge of self-defence. “We argued that Lilia had been subjected to violence for many years by her spouse and her actions needed to be examined in that context.” In court, several people testified that Sergei had treated her violently for a long time, with at least three people saying he had personally admitted as much to them. Their case was complicated, however, by the fact that the concept of domestic violence doesn’t exist in Russian law, Karacheva said, and is usually only prosecuted as an example of sustained psychological or physical torture.
Karacheva asked the court to acquit Lilia, while the prosecutor requested a 12-year sentence. In May 2024, the judge lowered the conviction to manslaughter and gave her four years’ probation.
Both sides appealed. Karacheva said Lilia acted purely in self-defence and should be fully acquitted, while the prosecutors asked the appellate court to convict her of manslaughter. Lilia, the prosecutor argued, “had a motive to kill Popov since he had systematically subjected her to violence”.
“We have a lot of hope”
Just before her sentencing, Lilia had begun taking steps to move on from the traumatic affair. She hadn’t wanted to return to modeling, but started going to a photography club organized in St. Petersburg by photographer Rodion Ataulin.
Lilia, he said, participated actively in the club, made friends there and always made “very insightful comments”. Rodion hadn’t spent time one-on-one with Lilia until May, when he saw the news of her sentencing on Instagram.
When they went on their first date, Rodion didn’t mention the case until four hours in, when Lilia told him she’d been in jail. “I said, ‘I know’. She said, ‘I know you know’,” he told the BBC.
When they met, Rodion says Lilia had given up on trying to get a formal job, having been hindered at every turn by her criminal record. Rodion said she never mentioned why she didn’t return to modeling but he assumed it was for the same reason.
She did manage to get jobs in pottery and floristry last summer, but Rodion said she didn’t get past her two weeks’ probation in three different roles. “She was rejected, I think, mainly because of her emotional state. When she gets really anxious, she becomes quite distracted and it’s hard to work in that state,” he said. Over the course of the summer, her anxiety got worse and worse as her appeal hearing in October loomed.
The hearing lasted three sessions. “I had a bad feeling, to be honest,” Irena remembers. “She wrote to me after the first session: ‘Mum, everything went badly.’”
Rodion had the same feeling. “It was clear they wanted to jail her,” he said.
They knew they just had two weeks of freedom until her final sentencing. “It was an awful feeling,” Rodion said. “I’ve never felt anything like it. You just live, you enjoy life, knowing this could end.”
Irena, who couldn’t travel from the Moscow suburbs to St Petersburg for the sentencing, said Lilia had warned that her four-year suspended sentence could be changed to jail time. She spent the whole day waiting to hear from her daughter.
“I was so nervous on the phone. Then I hear a voice message,” Irena said. Lilia calmly told her, ‘“They gave me seven years.’” Then she paused and continued. ‘But don’t worry, everything will be ok.’ I tried to call her back right away but she didn’t answer, and I remembered that when you’re arrested they take away your phone.”
Rodion said it was “emotionally very difficult, but I think we were ready”. They had 20 minutes together before she was taken away. “We sat in this little room on the floor, hugging each other. The lawyer occasionally came in but then left us to be alone. Even the guard turned his back to avoid embarrassing us,” he said.
Now, Rodion brings her packages in prison, tries to get meetings with her and writes letters. “I never before believed in – and so longed for – the future as much as I do now. We have a lot of strength and hope,” he wrote on Instagram.
In December, Lilia’s lawyer filed another appeal. It will be her last chance at freedom.
Read this story in Russian here.
English version edited by Max de Haldevang.
