“Tiempo de Policiales,” a popular true-crime show, hosted Elena Makarova’s two lawyers. Its anchor called the prosecution “absurd.”
by Massimo Introvigne
On November 2, 2026, “Tiempo de Policiales” (“Police Time”), a popular Argentine streaming and radio program devoted to true crime, police investigations, and criminal justice, dedicated most of its episode on ATP Stream to the so-called “Russian cult of Bariloche.” Gastón Marote, a highly respected journalist, editor, and crime reporter, anchors the show and has built his reputation over a long career with major news agencies, television channels, and streaming platforms. His guests were René Herrera and Sebastian Perazzoli, the lawyers of Elena Makarova, the young Russian mother whom Argentine prosecutors regard as the main victim in their case against the Russian esoteric teacher Konstantin Rudnev.
Readers who have not followed the case need some background. Makarova arrived in Argentina in January 2025, in the last weeks of her pregnancy. She had left a violent partner in Russia and chose the Patagonian tourist city of San Carlos de Bariloche to give birth in peace. As the University of Buenos Aires anthropologist María Vardé has reconstructed in a recent article in “The Journal of CESNUR,” Makarova was accompanied by a friend of her mother; neither woman spoke Spanish, and at the hospital they relied on a Russian-speaking acquaintance who could communicate with the staff. Hospital personnel read this as a sign that Makarova could not speak freely. A nurse thought she looked younger than the age in her passport and took her silence for fear or submission. A white rose Makarova gave her as a token of gratitude was interpreted as a coded request for help.
The name of Rudnev entered the story through the question of paternity. Makarova refused to identify her former partner and asked that the child be registered under her own surname. Hospital staff nevertheless insisted on documents about the father, although, as the nurse later admitted, these were not legally required for discharge. A photocopy of Rudnev’s passport surfaced. Her mother’s friend had found it in the apartment where they were staying, whose owner was helping Rudnev and his wife with Argentine residence permit applications. A disagreement about the feminine and masculine endings of the Russian surname to be given to a baby boy was later presented by prosecutors as an attempt to alter the newborn’s identity.
After Makarova’s cesarean delivery in March 2025, police and prosecutors intervened. She woke up without her phone, separated from the people who helped her communicate, and was later transferred to a shelter far from Bariloche. On March 28, Rudnev, his wife, and other Russian citizens were arrested at Bariloche airport. Within a few days, prosecutors accused twenty-one people of belonging to a “coercive transnational organization” hiding behind philosophy, spirituality, and yoga, and charged them with aggravated trafficking for sexual exploitation and servitude, attempted alteration of a newborn’s identity, immigration offenses, and transportation of narcotics. Vardé shows how much of this picture was borrowed from Russian and Montenegrin media and anti-cult narratives about Rudnev, and how the drug allegation survived even after laboratory reports of the Gendarmerie excluded cocaine and other controlled substances in the seized tablets. Rudnev, the only defendant kept in pre-trial detention, was briefly moved to house arrest, which the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation revoked in June 2026, while his health kept deteriorating.
From the beginning, Makarova has denied having been the victim of anyone. She says she never met Rudnev, and she has long since returned to Russia, where she lives with her son and her family. She has told her story in her own words in Bitter Winter.
Marote opened the segment without diplomacy. He reminded his audience that he had already hosted five or six of the women defendants, who “all tell you the same thing,” and said that no “cult” existed. Rudnev, he observed, had gone in media accounts from being presented as “the most bloodthirsty murderer in Russia” to appearing as “a poor guy fighting for his life.” He called the case “a mess wherever you look at it” and “absurd,” and described its central paradox with irony: Makarova “assures you and swears that she is not a victim, and the justice system says, no, you are a victim.” The only thing missing, he added, is a “brainwashing” session in the style of old movies, after which she would repeat with glazed eyes that she is Rudnev’s victim. Marote also suggested that a political climate in which some associate every Russian with Vladimir Putin may have played a role, although Rudnev, in the anchor’s words, had to leave Russia because he opposed Putin.
René Herrera explained that for a year and a half Makarova has been trying to tell the Argentine courts that she is not a victim. He acknowledged that the law allows an investigation to proceed even if the alleged victim does not perceive herself as such. Her statements, he argued, must still be weighed, but the prosecutors seem determined to ignore her. He noted that the prosecutors also took action against the lawyers who represented Makarova before him, which he described as the first case he knew in which a prosecutor goes after the defendant, the alleged victim, and the victim’s lawyers. Herrera also asked listeners not to confuse this case with an unrelated Argentine investigation into Russian women who allegedly came to the country to give birth and sell their babies. Makarova, he said, came to raise her son, and only wanted tranquility far from an abusive partner.
Asked by Marote how Makarova experienced her hospitalization and the stay in the shelter, Herrera said that her phone was taken away and she was kept almost incommunicado under the pretext of protecting her. She was pressured to say certain things, and she was repeatedly told how she should consider herself, while she kept answering that she was not a victim. A woman who had just given birth, without an interpreter she trusted, under such pressure, may have said something that did not correspond to reality and is now being used against her. Herrera insisted that he is not defending Rudnev, who has his own lawyers, and that his job is to protect Makarova’s rights. If there are doubts about what happened, he said, the proper response is to hear her and compare her account with the rest of the evidence. In his opinion, the prosecutors are “blinded” by their own accusation.
Makarova, Herrera added, wants to testify again and to follow the hearings remotely from Russia with an official interpreter she can trust. A recent request to have her testimony taken in advance was rejected. She has no intention of traveling to Argentina again after what happened to her, and with the help of new colleagues who have joined the defense team, her lawyers are evaluating a lawsuit against the Argentine State, something she has repeatedly asked for. They expect a court response on her testimony before the judicial recess that starts in December.
Marote went further than the lawyer. “I do believe Elena Makarova is a victim,” he said. In his view, she was victimized first by the clinic that mistreated her and claimed she could not leave unless the father showed up, in a country where countless single mothers give birth without anybody asking for the father, and then by the police, the justice system, and those who took her to shelters where she was worse off than before. After the interview, the anchor reflected that, if the Argentine State is held liable, taxpayers will pay for the mistakes of prosecutors and judges. He listed allegations made by some of the defendants: detained women pushed against walls and forced to clean cells at the Federal Police station in Bariloche, Russian citizens questioned through a translation app on a mobile phone, money that disappeared from defendants who later filed complaints. He called the case one “held together with wire, and I am being generous,” and spoke of a “directed” investigation, a heavier word than “bad.” He even said, mentioning prosecutor Fernando Arrigo by name, that he hoped never to end up being investigated by him.
Sebastian Perazzoli, who joined the program separately for technical reasons, reported on the latest procedural developments. In October, Makarova’s lawyers asked the guarantees judge to take her testimony as an “anticipo jurisdiccional de prueba,” a procedure that allows a witness to be heard before a judge in advance of the trial. They gave several reasons. Makarova lives in the Russian Federation, a country at war, and there is a real risk that her testimony may be lost if the court keeps waiting. She has also repeatedly expressed her dissatisfaction with the way the prosecutors are handling her case. The judge ruled that she may testify as many times as she wishes, but only through a Gesell chamber interview, the format used for vulnerable witnesses. He reasoned that similar requests, first by the prosecutors and then by Makarova’s former lawyers, had already been rejected, that the war was a mere possibility, and that taking her testimony in advance might affect the defendants’ right of defense. Perazzoli found this last argument the weakest, since most defense lawyers had supported the request. The lawyers appealed, and on the very day of the broadcast the Bariloche guarantees judge declared the appeal formally admissible, which means that a review court should hear the matter shortly, probably before the end of November.
Perazzoli, who speaks with Makarova frequently, said that she is grateful to the Argentine people, who welcomed her warmly, and that her bitterness is directed at the judicial system, and in particular at the prosecutors, more than at the police. “We cannot allow, as a democratic society,” he said, that a person not suspected of any crime be kept in a shelter against her will, all the more in living conditions that, according to her account, were inadequate. He understood why she does not want to return to Argentina.
The lawyer offered a measured assessment of the prosecution. He considered it reasonable that the prosecutors started investigating after the hospital’s report, since it concerned a potentially serious crime. In his opinion, however, they proceeded “imprudently” and raised such high expectations that they now find it very difficult to step back. To claim that an organization of twenty people engaged in human trafficking with a single victim, he said, “makes no sense.” Perazzoli recalled that the Federal Code of Criminal Procedure has introduced an accusatory system, one of whose aims is to filter cases so that only those that deserve it go to trial.
The prosecutors argue that, in some trafficking cases, the will of the victim may be “vitiated,” so that she does not perceive herself as a victim. Perazzoli was willing to accept this argument provisionally at the start of an investigation. After a year and a half, things look different. Makarova lives in Russia with her baby, her mother, and her brother, has no contacts or conversations with the defendants, and still states that she was not the victim of any crime. With her permission, Perazzoli spoke with the public victims’ defender who first assisted her, and learned that she had told him exactly the same thing from the beginning: that she had come to Argentina to give birth and escape a problem with her former partner.
The victim label imposed on her, Perazzoli said, hurts Makarova morally in a very serious way. Based on the evidence the prosecutors have made available, he sees no grounds for the case to go forward. A judge will decide at the hearing on the control of the accusation whether the case should go to trial, and Makarova authorized her lawyer to announce her position in advance: she will support the defendants’ requests for dismissal, since she regards the whole proceeding against them, in her own words, as “extremely unjust.”
Marote closed the segment less optimistic than his guests. He fears that the prosecutors, out of stubbornness, may push the case to trial anyway and leave it to the trial prosecutor and judges to sort it out. If that happens, he predicted, the trial judges will hold their heads in their hands, because they will find no way to defend the prosecution’s position. For now, the young mother at the center of the case is still waiting for the Argentine justice system to do the one thing she has been asking for since March 2025: take her words seriously.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of Pennsylvania Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
