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.)
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After serving his stint on the battlefield, Gavrilov, twice convicted but pardoned by Putin, was back home living in the community when the girl, one of his neighbors, knocked on his door to pick something up for her mother, according to local media. The little girl emerged later covered in bruises and clearly wounded, having apparently been sexually abused; Gavrilov has since found himself back behind bars.
“I called an ambulance and the police. I cried with my daughter, it was so scary,” the girl’s mother told local media.
As should be expected from the mindfuck that is modern-day Russia, state-controlled media is reportedly under strict orders not to write about the crimes of the country’s newly anointed (and previously convicted) war “heroes.” And if there were any hope that the country’s most violent offenders would die while making themselves useful (to Putin), a new report from Novaya Gazeta Europe this week revealed a thriving bribery system in the Russian army that allows troops to pay their way out of combat.
That is apparently preferred over the imagined heterosexual genocide Moscow pretends it is courageously fighting.
“In Russia, LGBT was recognized as an extremist organization and banned! Our Motherland has once again confirmed its status as a bastion of traditional and religious values!” Chechen minister Akhmed Dudayev gushed Thursday. Never mind that the organization “banned” has never existed to begin with; the “International LGBT Movement” dubbed extremist by Russia’s highest court Thursday is a bogeyman apparently invented to apply to anyone openly identifying as gay.
Lawmaker Alexander Khinshtein bizarrely praised the court’s decision as being crucial to prevent “aggressive LGBT propaganda” from enlisting “new members in the LGBT movement.”
What a nightmare that would be. A bigger nightmare, say, than having to explain to an abused 11-year-old child why a violent criminal deemed too dangerous for society was suddenly freed and turned into one of the “good guys.”
In this case, at least the girl survived. Last month, a 32-year-old ex-con freed for the war returned home and burned two women alive. A few weeks earlier, an ex-con back from the war took part in the fatal stabbing of six people. Over the summer, a man serving time for murder was released for the war, after which he went on to abduct and beat up a 9-year-old child.
That’s just a small sampling. But sure, it’s those damn gays Russia needs to protect its citizens from.
