A Russian known as "the Black Realtor" has left prison after fighting for six months in Ukraine as part of the Russian military.
Alexander Tyutin, a 66-year-old real estate agent who had hired hitmen to kill his business partner and his family as well as his own niece, signed up for the Wagner Group and entered Ukraine in June 2022 to fight.
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Six months after joining the group, Tyutin has left his service and walked out of prison, able to fly to Turkey and reunite with his wife, The Sun reported.
Tyutin was sentenced to 23 years in prison after he paid a contract killer $10,000 to execute his business partner Dmitry Zeinalov along with the Zeinalov’s pregnant wife and the couple’s children, aged 10 and 14. The hitman used an axe and machine gun to massacre the family.
Tyutin later visited the family’s grave where he reportedly urinated on it.
He attempted to hire another hitman to kill his niece over a $100,000 inheritance, offering $9,000 for the contract, but the hitman turned out to be an undercover cop, according to Radar Online.
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Now a free man after his Ukraine service, Tyutin’s release has prompted further criticism of the Wagner Group and its recruiting methods, which have increasingly relied on prisoners to bolster the sagging Russian forces.
The Pentagon recently revealed that it believed Russia had lost over 100,000 troops since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine nearly one year ago.
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Wagner chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin recommended Tyutin for the Order of Courage medal for his "battlefield bravery," particularly as part of an operation that stormed a fortified settlement. Prigozhin praised Tyutin’s "decisive and skillful actions."
But he has had to defend his support of Tyutin along with the other convicted criminals in his service.
"Let me explain to you the philosophy of jail inmates taking part in the war," Prigozhin reportedly explained. "An inmate killed a family of four. You don't know and haven’t seen that family, but you feel angry about it."
"That inmate went to the war and was killed. Or, he survived by a miracle," Prigozhin continued. "He is a murderer, and in the war he is worth three or four or even more dandelion boys, whose milk on their lips is still wet."
"Among those dandelion boys is your son, your father and your husband," he added. "So weigh it up. Would you rather have the murderer going to war, or your family members?"
"This story is almost certainly part of the PR campaign run by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, Putin’s chef turned head of his personal hit squad, the Wagner Group," Rebekah Koffler, president of Doctrine & Strategy Consulting and a former DIA intelligence officer, told Fox News Digital. "On Wednesday, Prigozhin who has been widely criticized for having dangerous criminals freed up, attacked the journalists on Wednesday with a verbal tirade, asking if any of them would volunteer to go to Ukraine, or are they just peeing in their pants, meaning being cowards."
Koffler continued, "He insisted that your father, brother, son could be those uninitiated boys sent to Ukraine and get killed. Prigozhin said that it’s only by chance that Tyutin survived the war. What doesn’t add up in Prigozhin’s propaganda operation is that Tyutin is not even a professional killer, he had hired a professional killer for the murder that he had ordered."
