Russian president awards bravery medals to conscripted convicts who served six months in Ukraine 

Vladimir Putin has begun handing out medals to reward violent convicts who were recruited from Russian prisons for their “bravery” in fighting in Ukraine.

Hayk Gasparyan, a convicted armed robber, was released from his maximum-security prison to serve with pro-Kremlin forces illegally encroaching on his neighbors in a scheme reminiscent of the 1978 World War II film Inglorious Bas* **ds.

The 31-year-old Armenian MMA fighter had only served a few months of a seven-year prison sentence in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, for armed robbery, but is now officially a free man after being pardoned. by Putin for completing six. months of service at the front.

Gasparyan was also seen on a recent state television broadcast of Putin meeting and greeting several soldiers at an event in Rostov-on-Don, a city in southern Russia located just 50 miles from the Ukrainian border.

Also present at the heavily staged ceremony were several people who had previously been identified as actors in other Kremlin propaganda videos.

In the photo, Gasparyan receives his Order of Valor from the Russian President.

In the photo, Putin is meeting with fighters in Rostov-On-Don, some of whom are criminals released from prison to serve on the front lines. Gasparyan is in a circle. Some of the people in this image, including the blonde woman standing directly in front of Putin, have been identified as actors who have appeared in various Kremlin propaganda pieces.

Gasparyan served in the infamous Wagner group, a Russian mercenary gang set up by one of Putin’s cronies that has embarked on a massive recruitment campaign in Russian prisons.

“I serve Russia and Wagner,” he told Putin, who awarded him the Order of Valor for bravery on the battlefield.

The armed robber was convicted a year ago of robbing a man outside a Moscow bank of £3,500 at gunpoint.

In the coming weeks, thousands of murderers, rapists and thieves are likely to receive similar pardons from Putin.

Wagner was founded by Putin’s ‘chef’ Yevgeny Prigozhin, himself an ex-convict who once hosted major banquets in the Kremlin for the Russian president, in 2014.

Since then, Prigozhin has built a fearsome army to aid Putin’s soldiers in the fight against Ukraine by picking up some 40,000 violent prisoners, promising them full pardons of their sentences if they can survive six months on the front lines.

Prigozhin’s use of hardened prisoners to carry out major war operations in Ukraine dates back to the 1978 film Inglorious Basterds, one of the inspirations behind Quentin Tarantino’s acclaimed 2009 film Inglorious Basterds.

Wagner was founded by Putin’s ‘chef’ Yevgeny Prigozhin, himself an ex-convict who conducted a massive recruitment drive in Russian prisons to bolster Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

Putin’s chef Yevgeny Prigozhin is filmed recruiting inmates in one of the Russian colonies in October 2022.

In the film, a band of degenerate American soldiers who are court-martialed for committing a series of crimes including robbery, mutiny and murder, undertake a daring mission to steal some of Germany’s most prized military equipment: a V2 rocket. and return it to the allied powers.

The concept of releasing hardened criminals from their cells to go to war is nothing new.

During World War II, Hitler’s feared paramilitary group, the SS, created a division made up almost exclusively of violent convicts, the mentally ill, and disgraced soldiers from other units.

The 36th Waffen Grenadier Division, better known simply as the Dirlewanger Brigade, is among the worst of an already deplorable group of units that made up the SS.

The Dirlewanger Brigade was formed in 1940 and is named after its commanding officer, Oskar Dirlewanger, who fought in World War I and was, by all accounts, a drug-addicted sex offender with a penchant for violence and violence. brutality going in and out of prison.

Nazi Lieutenant General Gottlob Berger, a close comrade of Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler, managed to break him out of prison and after Dirlewanger was impressed by having fought on the side of General Francisco Franco in the Spanish civil war, he was welcomed back into the Nazi fold. and presented a commanding SS unit as a reward.

Nazi troops believed to be members of the Dirlewanger Brigade are shown in Poland in 1944 en route to put down the Warsaw Uprising.

The mercenaries of Yevgeny Prigozhin (left), a close ally of Putin and financier of the Wagner Group, have committed heinous war crimes against towns on several continents. His methods bear a striking similarity to those of the Dirlewanger Brigade, an infamous SS unit commanded by Oskar Dirlewanger (right)

In its early days, the Dirlewanger Brigade was nothing more than a small group of criminals, mostly poachers famous for their hunting skills, who were deployed primarily to help round up Jews and root out resistance fighters.

Many SS commanders strongly disliked the convicted rapist and his bunch of degenerates, but they proved effective at their job, and as the war progressed and the demand for manpower increased, Dirlewanger was given carte blanche to expand his ranks. .

Life expectancy in the brigade was not high. They were provided with little equipment, were sent to very hostile conditions, and it was common for fellow ‘wangers to kill each other over minor disagreements.

Over the course of the war, however, the brigade grew from a group of a few dozen poachers to a thousands-strong battalion of savages plucked from the bottom of the barrel.

As its reputation for brutality grew, the brigade stopped persecuting Jews and dealing with concentration camps and became a unit of pure exterminators.

They were sent to occupied countries to quell civil uprisings and terrorize local populations by massacring large numbers of people in the most savage and brutal ways imaginable.