Saturday, November 25, 2023

HEROES OF THE MOTHERLAND
2 Russians convicted of murdering and eating victims have been released after fighting in Ukraine: reports


Thibault Spirlet
Fri, November 24, 2023

Two men convicted of murder were released after fighting in Ukraine, per Russian media.


Denis Gorin and Nikolai Ogolobyak killed their victims and ate parts of their bodies, reports said.


Russia has sent convicts to the front lines to fill in the gaps in its military, analysts say.

Russia released two prisoners convicted of murder, who then ate parts of their victims, after they fought in Ukraine, according to multiple Russian reports.


In 2003, Denis Gorin was sentenced to 9 years and 10 months in jail for premeditated murder and "subsequently desecrating the corpse of his victim," according to court records shared and translated by Meduza.

He was released on parole in 2010. But three years later was sentenced to 20 years and 10 months in prison for knifing an acquaintance to death, cutting his victim's leg, and consuming it as food to "remember the old days," per court records shared by the outlet.

Meanwhile, in 2010, Nikolai Ogolobyak was given a 20-year prison term for murder and the desecration of dead bodies after killing four teenagers with accomplices in blood rituals in 2008, per 76.ru.

Both men would spend years behind bars before being released to fight in Ukraine.

Gorin, from Russia's Sakhalin region, is wearing a military uniform in a photo published on his social media page in October, according to a Telegram post by the Sakhalin Against War account. The report fails to specify where the picture was taken.

He's now recovering from moderate injuries at a military hospital in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, his neighbor Dmitry told Russian news outlet Siberia Realities.

"He's basically free, pardoned, and half his [prison] sentence has been wiped out," Dmitry told the outlet, according to a translation by Ukrainska Pravda.

However, Dmitry added that his freedom could be short-lived.

"I don't think he'll stay free for long. His victims' relatives remember everything," he told the outlet.

Ogolobyak, from Russia's Yaroslavl region, was pardoned after serving in a Storm Z assault detachment for six months in Ukraine, per the local 76.ru news website.

Ogolobyak and his associates murdered two people by chopping their heads off and extracting their hearts and tongues before frying and eating them, the outlet reported, citing court documents.

Ogolobya stabbed two other victims to death, penetrating their bodies 666 times and counting the blows out loud, witnesses said.

His father told the outlet that he is now recovering after sustaining serious injuries and will likely not go back to fight, according to a translation by the Moscow Times.

The Wagner mercenary group had used convicts to fight in Ukraine, recruiting up to 49,000 of them, a group official identified as Marx said, per the Telegram channel Razgruzka Vagnera.

Russia's army has also deployed convicts in penal battalions to fight in Ukraine as it struggles to mount effective offensives on the battlefield, the UK's Ministry of Defence said in October.

En.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Russian_cannibals

Pages in category "Russian cannibals" ; B · Dmitry and Natalia Baksheevy · Alexander Bychkov ; K · Ilshat Kuzikov ; M · Mikhail Malyshev ; N &...

 Latimes.com

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-05-25-mn-62454-story.html

May 25, 1997 ... But none of these tragedies of Soviet history explain people like Spesivtsev taking up cannibalism, says Russian anthropologist Mikhail A.

Cipdh.gob.ar

https://www.cipdh.gob.ar/memorias-situadas/en/lugar-de-memoria/memorial-de-la-isla-nazino

It is known as Death Island or Cannibal Island because around 6000 people were deported and abandoned there in the summer of 1933 by order of the Soviet ...


News.ycombinator.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21445022

Nov 4, 2019 ... ... wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad#Cannibalism. and some stats : "By December 1942 the NKVD had arrested 2,105 cannibals – dividing them ...

Time.com

https://time.com/4958639/russia-cannibalist-couple-krasnador

Sep 27, 2017 ... A Russian 'Cannibal Couple' May Have Eaten up to 30 People, Investigators Say ... Police in southwestern Russia have arrested a couple accused of ...

Independent.co.uk

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/newly-discovered-diaries-reveal-cannibal-nazi-horror-a7796246.html

Nov 16, 2017 ... Approximately 1,500 Leningraders were arrested for cannibalism during this time. According to historian Guy Walters, the Russian language ...


Journals.openedition.org

https://journals.openedition.org/emscat/3441

Mangi practised cannibalism, including eating bones (ibid.). Most colonial powers actively employed these images of indigenous people as cannibals, associating ...


Russia's worker shortage is so bad the economy is leaning on the Soviet-era practice of using prison labor, think tank says

Jennifer Sor
Thu, November 23, 2023

Security worker walks by the gate of a penal colony in Vladimir, Russia.

Kirill Zarubin/AP Photo

  • Russia is leaning more on prison labor amid a dearth of available workers.

  • Income generated from forced convict labor notched 19 billion rubles last year.

  • Around a million Russians have fled the country to avoid fighting and escape Russia's economic situation.

Russia's worker shortage is so bad, the nation is increasingly leaning on prison labor to prop up its ailing industries and make up for a lack of manpower.

In 2022, Russia pulled in an estimated 19.1 billion rubles, or around $204 million from forced prison labor, The Moscow Times recently reported, citing dating from Russia's finance ministry. That exceeded estimates that Russia made the year prior, when budget makers anticipated bringing in just 15.8 billion roubles from forced prison labor.

The nation expected to rake in 15.9 billion rubles in 2023 and 16.2 billion rubles in 2024, according to 2021 budget estimates.There are around 26,000 Russian prisoners forced into labor across 1,700 organizations, according to August 2023 data from Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service. That's more than double what was reported in 2022, when 9,300 prisoners were forced to work, according to the research and analytics firm Jamestown Foundation.

Those trends have been sparked by a record workforce shortage in Russia, with around a million Russians having fled the country to avoid fighting or escape Russia's difficult economic situation.

"The Russian economy is facing harsh structural challenges, including the lack of a qualified work force," Jamestown senior fellow Sergey Sukhankin said in a note last month. "The Kremlin has sought to integrate prison labor with certain sectors of the domestic economy to solve this issue."

The use convict labor isn't new to Russia. The practice dates back to the Soviet era's "Gulag" system, where convicts were assigned to work in the riskiest and most "lucrative" sectors of the Soviet Union's economy, Sukhankin said.

Prison labor could eventually evolve into a system similar what was seen in the Soviet Era, Sukhankin added, assuming that Russia's current leadership survives conflict in Ukraine.

"The recent uptick in the use of forced prison labor in Russia is not merely the transient trend of a post-COVID, economically troubled, or war-hurt Russia. In the event that [...] Vladimir Putin survives the war in Ukraine, the use of prison labor in Russia might evolve into a system similar to the Soviet period," Sukhankin added.

Economists, meanwhile, have been sounding grim warnings for Russia's future as the nation continues to be battered by war and western sanctions. Predictions have been as dire as Russia becoming a failed state over the next 10 years, as sanctions bite and its reputation as a pariah state isolates it from world trade.


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