Reuters
Russian leaders rushed to join a congratulatory circle jerk Thursday over the country’s Supreme Court supposedly upholding the nation’s status as a “stronghold of traditional values” by banning a mythical LGBTQ organization.
And at the exact same time, a mother in Orenburg was reeling over the rape of her 11-year-old daughter—by a criminal President Vladimir Putin freed from prison in the name of these same Russian “values.”
Yury Gavrilov, 33, is far from the first criminal to unleash violence on Russian civilians (or children, for that matter) after receiving a get-out-of-jail-free card from the Kremlin to take part in the war against Ukraine. His alleged rape of a fifth-grade girl in Orenburg is just the latest in a steady drip of such cases to be reported since the government passed amendments last year normalizing the Defense Ministry’s recruitment of violent criminals. (And that’s to say nothing of the Ukrainian civilians killed in exchange for the convicts’ freedom.)