No one could have foreseen this. OR NOT.
“The Violent Homecoming of Russian Convicts Freed to Fight in Ukraine”
“Wave of new, brutal crimes comes as former prisoners finish military contracts and go home; ‘thousands of criminals are walking our streets’”
“In early August, police in Russia’s rural northwest were called to the scene of a mass murder. In the charred remains of two homes set ablaze hours earlier, they found the burned, mutilated bodies of six local residents.
News of the massacre shook Derevyannoye, a village of 1,200 people, where sailing boats bob in Onega Lake and the border with Finland is a three-hour drive away. What was most shocking was the identity of one of the two suspects: a repeat offender freed from a maximum-security prison to fight in Ukraine.
Igor Sofonov had been in and out of jail for 20 years by the time he joined Storm Z, a unit of convicts created to bolster Russia’s war effort. If he and others survived long enough to complete their six-month contracts, they were promised their freedom through a secretive program of presidential pardons.
Sofonov survived, and returned to Russia with the remainder of his sentence for drug trafficking erased. He is among around 30,000 enlisted ex-prisoners, many of whom had been serving long prison terms for violent crimes, who have returned home to liberty.”
“A Russian infantry assault group getting hit with conventional and cluster munitions near Stepove by the 129th Territorial Defense Brigade.”
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1731983631868895598
News stories like this reach and penetrate among the usually uninformed general public and among the ladies of the house.