It is not often that the Duma criticizes what was decided at the top and indicates what should be done instead. Probably for this reason, Nina Ostanina, President of the Commission for Family, Women and Minors, was particularly cautious: “Nobody has abolished control over these citizens… I don’t see anything serious in the fact that public security authorities are calling for this Check children regularly.”
There are many “children”, tens of thousands of criminals who returned from the “special operation” in Ukraine after receiving a pardon. And in many villages and towns in Russia all they talk about is these people who wander around boastfully, pretending to be heroes and terrorizing the population. Igor Safonov, imprisoned for drug trafficking, fought for six months and then resurfaced in the village of Derevyannoye in Karelia, where he has now been arrested again on charges of killing and mutilating six people in two houses he owned then made the accusation of fire. Sergei Rudenko, released from prison where he was serving a murder sentence, was arrested after arriving in Rostov, where he allegedly strangled a woman with whom he had argued over the rent of a house. Another “boy” raped two minors as soon as he entered Volgograd, the former Stalingrad. Serial killer Oleg Grechko, who was in prison for three murders, was returned to the Nizhny Novgorod region and immediately set his sister on fire. In a village in the Kirov region, residents are very afraid: “You can’t sleep at night,” Galina Sapozhnikova told local newspapers. Ivan Rossomachin, another murderer who was released to Ukraine and survived the war, roamed the streets with an ax and a knife, shouting: “I will kill everyone!”
The numbers are impressive, as evidenced by recruiters. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former Wagner boss who died after a brief revolt against Putin, said he had taken 49,000 prisoners into his company. According to him, 32,000 survived the six months of fighting. After Wagner, the army also began fishing in prisons to bolster its ranks. Thousands more men belonged to the Storm-Z groups and were almost always used as cannon fodder. They were also sent forward only to attract enemy fire so that the commanders could locate the hiding places of the Ukrainian troops. Whoever had the brilliant idea of using this cheap labor may have thought that very few would survive. But this was not the case, and even at home the “boys” continue to behave as they probably did when they were still among the enemy population, at least according to the countless reports of the atrocities committed by the occupying forces.
Deputy Ostanina remembers that at the beginning it was decided to exclude inmates for the most serious crimes, but it is clear that things then turned out differently. So they demand that these “heroes” be subjected to at least the normal controls required of those in temporary freedom. Weekly or monthly visits to the police station and not full permission to do whatever they want.