For a country that decriminalized some forms of domestic violence in 2017, the separate court findings that the women had acted in legitimate self-defense when in fear for their lives were considered shocking, if not unprecedented.

“Here, the woman is always the accused; for some reason the sympathy always lies with the aggressor,” said Yelena Solovyova, the defense lawyer for Ms. Katorova in Nakhodka, near Vladivostok in the country’s far east. “This was such an ideological victory for me, because for the first time the court heard that you cannot blame the victim, you cannot transfer all the blame to the woman.”…

“A man beating his wife is less offensive than when a man is humiliated,” Yelena Mizulina, the lawmaker who led the effort to decriminalize domestic abuse, told reporters in 2016. She added that it was “mandatory” for a woman to respect her husband as the “authority” in the marriage.