Tag: Ukraine

2025: The Year in Cannibalism

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal NewsLeave a comment

Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
    — Shakespeare – Troilus and Cressida Act 1, Scene 3

January

Violence in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea marred celebrations of the country’s 25th anniversary of independence. Armed men were shown in videos holding body parts and saying “this is our meat.” The story brought back memories of former US President Joe Biden claiming his uncle’s body was never found during the Second World War as he had been eaten in PNG, stating that “there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea”.

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, already in hot water for sex trafficking and racketeering charges, has been accused of cannibalism now. In the Peacock documentary Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy – which covers the rise and dramatic fall of Combs, 55 – former Making the Band 2 contestant Sara Rivers revealed what she and others experienced when cameras weren’t rolling. When Diddy got angry, she says, he threatened her band member:

“You make me so mad I want to eat your flesh!”

In the North West Province of South Africa, one of a group of illegal miners (zama zamas, or “those who take a chance” inZulu) in the Stilfontein mine (which closed in 2013) has disclosed that he and his fellow miners turned to cannibalism when they ran out of food 2km (1.25 miles) underground. The police had cut off food supplies the previous August to ‘smoke out’ the illegal miners.

February

Two artists put on a show in Scotland where they made and cooked “black pudding” sausages from their own blood. Although they did not eat the sausages after this show due to legal considerations, they have done so in the past, although one of the artists has since become a vegetarian and has said he will not be eating them in the future.

John Beagles and Graham Ramsay

Tyree Smith, the “Connecticut Cannibal”, was given conditional release by the Nutmeg State’s Psychiatric Security Review Board from the mental facility to which he was incarcerated. Smith was handed sixty years in 2013 for killing a homeless man and eating his brain and eyeball in a cemetery, washed down with sake. Doctors who have been treating Smith said he’s been fully rehabilitated, thanks to medications that quelled the voices in his head. Others, including the family of the man he killed and ate, are less optimistic about his future plans. Mr Gonzalez’s sister-in-law, Talitha Frazier, asked the review board “How do we know he’s not going to do this again?” Republican state Senator Paul Cicarella said “Murder and cannibalism and release in the same sentence … that’s a problem”.

What’s with all the eyeballs? A “preppy” Princeton grad was charged with murdering his brother at their luxury Princeton apartment, after which he ripped out the victim’s eyeball and ate it. He also reportedly set the family’s cat on fire. Even the Duke of Cornwall in King Lear would have blushed at that transgression.

March

A woman in Brazil barbecued and ate her victim’s heart and penis. Josefa Lima de Sousa, 65, left a blood-stained sign by the mutilated corpse with a message, using her street name, saying: “Gringa got rapist.” She told police the victim had been a child abuser.

A Texas embalmer with the wonderful name Amber Ludermilk was charged with the felony “abuse of a corpse” after cutting off the penis of a deceased sex offender and jamming it into his mouth. An arresting constable stated that “No matter what one thinks of his life, the law requires that he be treated with dignity in death.” In a world where thousands of humans die of starvation every day, and we casually torment, kill and then mutilate the corpses of billions of other animals every year for food, medical experiments, clothing or entertainment, are we expected to weep for this sex offender’s insentient corpse?

A South Carolina mental health facility was sued by family of a victim of murder and cannibalism. The lawsuit alleged that the killer, another inmate, had killed two men and eaten both the victims’ ears, as well as drinking their blood so he could “gain their power.”

In Rwanda, a minister said that persecution and cannibalism of Tutsi people are still “commonplace.” Readers may remember that just over thirty years ago, almost one million ethnic Tutsis in that country, some 75% of the Tutsi population, were slaughtered in the space of just 100 days. Although the word genocide has come to mean ‘anything done by someone you don’t like’, that one was a real genocide.

June

A young woman who calls herself pterodactylhunny disclosed on TikTok that her doctors had given her one her ribs which had been surgically removed. She took it home, boiled it to remove the meat, then ate the meat to see what it tasted like. Spoiler: the formaldehyde in which it had been soaked made it taste pretty bad. The cannibalism of eating her own flesh, however, she described as “cool” and “not that weird”. Viewers responses ranged from shocked to approving, pointing out that eating one’s own meat could be considered vegan, since the animal from which it came had given her consent.

@pterodactylhunny

this is a true story

♬ original sound – evil trickster woman

July

16 men were arrested in the West Pokot region of Kenya after human remains were found including the bodies of several children. One boy was found in a maize field with his organs removed. Police say the suspects have confessed to killing and eating eight people.

Relatives of the victims of a mass-murderer in Idaho were outraged to find that he had taken a plea deal for the stabbing of four students in 2022, thus avoiding the death penalty. No indication of him eating his victims, but a forensic psychologist reported that he had become a strict vegan before that, because:

He was afraid that if he let himself go to taste meat once, he would become addicted to it—like he had become to heroin—and start killing and eating people.”

In Kenya, a man recently released from prison for killing his wife, murdered his second wife, cooked her flesh and fed it to his children. Irate members of the community lynched him and set him on fire. The incident elicited sharp debate among Kenyans over the old claims of cannibalism among members of the community. Samuel Bosire Angwenyi, the Secretary General of Abagusii Council of Elders, dismissed the claims saying it was a myth which some people blindly believed. “If there is a person who can eat a fellow human being, then that must be Satan.”

August

An Australian boxer whose nickname is “the Butcher” told fans he had “become a cannibal”. What he meant was that, as part of his training for a big fight, he had taken advantage of the birth of his child by eating his wife’s placenta, in tablet form, washing it down with a little breast milk. He said:

“I’ve technically become a cannibal. It’s actually like a superpower”

In Cuba, a man arrested for murder was found to have a jar filled with human fat, jars of fried meat, and a bag of ribs in his refrigerators. Cannibalism was suspected but never officially confirmed. Meanwhile, other residents of Santiago de Cuba, seeing an unusual level of police activity in September, fear that the case may be linked to the disappearance of other residents from the Abel Santamaría neighbourhood.

In Zimbabwe, a woman allegedly poisoned her four-year-old granddaughter, Tawanayasha Kadhene, before mutilating her body in Shurugwi on 26 August. Police said: “The suspect gave the victim a maheu drink laced with a maize pesticide pill. The child collapsed and died instantly. The suspect then cut flesh from the victim’s cheek, mixed it with herbs prescribed by a sangoma, cooked it and ate the mixture.” The ritual killing allegedly happened following the woman’s consultation of a traditional healer.

September

In an unusual case of auto-cannibalism, a patient at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine received intravenous lorazepam to treat anxiety and claustrophobia in order to facilitate an MRI. He subsequently developed acute psychosis, performed self-inflicted digital enucleation of his left eye, and then ingested it. Lorazepam is a benzodiazepine that has been FDA-approved as a fast-acting anxiolytic and sedative. It is one of the most commonly used medications for these indications. The studies of the case claim that it is an “extremely rare paradoxical reactions to benzodiazepines.” Worth keeping an eye on though.

October

A thirteen-year-old boy in Egypt was arrested after reports he had murdered his classmate, sawed his body into pieces and ate them “out of curiosity”. He told the police that he that he found human flesh was “similar to breaded chicken”.

November

The strange case of Gabriela Rico Jiménez, a 21-year-old model from Mexico who disappeared in 2009 after raging against alleged cannibalistic captors while outside a fancy hotel in Monterrey Nuevo Leon, has been rediscovered by TikTok posters. Didn’t know this was happening until my blog on the story suddenly started to take wings recently.

@hfnkw1

She warned us… and then vanished. The Gabriela Rico Jimenez case gets DARK.#scary #scarystories #horrortok #fyp

♬ original sound – hfnkw1

In New Zealand, a mortuary technician lost his licence due to posting online talks ‘promoting cannibalism. He offered to obtain human tissue to interested readers, and added “When we have burn victims…. They smell so good sometimes”. The man also engaged in online conversations about rape and sexualising children, his own alleged drug use and ways of making explosives.

December

We closed the year with allegations from the Ukrainian government that Russian troops trying to occupy Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine have run out of food and are killing and eating each other. The Ukrainian spy service GUR reported that:

“Due to a lack of food, the occupiers are sharpening their knives and preparing to eat their younger comrades”

Intercepted radio messages apparently include soldiers saying “We’ll eat each other, it’s all fucked up here. We’re already looking for someone younger” and “I’ve sharpened my knives. I don’t give a shit who I have to cut up. I just want to eat. Fuck everyone else”.

Around this time last year, this blog reported on several convicted Russian murderers who had admitted to cannibalism but been offered pardons if they agreed to serve in the Russian forces in Ukraine for six months. Later reports have noted that the pardons and repatriations may not ever have happened.

Back in Russia, “Perm cannibal” Mikhail Malyshev died at the age of 65 in a clinic, while waiting for a doctor. Malyshev was arrested in 2000 for two proven murders, although a polygraph test claims that he was involved in at least eight: he killed, dismembered and partially ate a man and a woman. Malyshev reportedly used the soft tissue to fry cutlets and threw away the rest. He often made kebabs out of stray dogs. He was sentenced to 25 years and served his sentence in the Perm region, undergoing mandatory psychiatric treatment. He was released from prison in October 2022. Some reports stated that after his release from prison, Malyshev had found work at a shelter for homeless animals. That part may be the most disturbing aspect of the 2025 story!

New cannibalism movies

A veritable swathe of new releases this year, showing again that cannibalism is the flavour of the month (sorry about the pun) or the year, or indeed the whole damn century:

Know Me: A True-Life DramaStory of the “Causeway Cannibal” and media response
DevourAll female metal band called “The Virginia Bitches” come across a town full of cannibals
Human Hibachi 3: The Last SupperCult of devout followers eat human sacrifices in a “last supper”
Cannibal ComedianCannibal takes a stab at stand-up
Cannibal MukbangShe makes vodcasts of voracious eating – mixed with cannibalism of bad men
DeliciousYoung working people work for, then eat, the rich
The WagerTrue story of a mutiny in the British Royal Navy in 1741 and the events that followed for those who survived
Red Night at Skye’sZombie meth cannibals led by a mad scientist
40 AcresDescendants of African American farmers fight roving cannibal gangs
Forgive Us AllNZ film – survivors flee through cannibal infested forest
River of BloodFour kayakers take wrong river into jungle of a cannibal tribe
No Tears in HellMother and son kill and eat poor people – based on Alexander Spesivtsev
Lone SamuraiSamurai battles cannibal tribe on island
StephenSerial killer’s victims are eaten by mysterious person
The BoatyardAtrociously acted ripoff of Hills Have Eyes
The Priest-Thanksgiving MassacreDepraved priest from earliest European settlement comes back to life to kill and eat people
The Weed EatersNZ film – new strain of marijuana turns users into cannibals
Quarantine CannibalWorking man fired from job cannot control cannibalism urges in quarantine

What a year. Can’t wait to see what 2026 is going to bring!

Cannibalism news – the 2024 round-up

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

‘There will be cannibalism, and rumours of cannibalism”

Yes, I paraphrased the Book of Matthew. Although not all that many people got eaten, the media was full of cannibal stories, and here are a few of them, sorted by their places of occurrence.

Australia

One of the men imprisoned for the so-called Snowtown murders (which mostly did not take place in the little town of Snowtown) was released. Mark Haydon was charged with assisting the men who did the actual killing and who ate part of one victim’s leg some 25 years earlier.

Brazil

Influencer Israel dos Santos Assis, better known online as Pinguim (Penguin) was arrested for desecrating graves in the cemetery of San Francisco the Count in the Salvador Metropolitan Region, stealing human bones, and using human flesh from the corpses to cook his most popular dish: feijoada, a bean stew usually involved simmering beans with beef or pork. Seems rotting human is a good substitute for pork.

Canada

Robert Pickton, the pig farmer convicted of six counts of second-degree murder (although he was charged with at least twenty others), was attacked by another inmate in prison and died a few weeks later. Pickton allegedly “processed” the meat of his rape and murder victims by feeding them to his pigs and, police said, possibly mixing them up with pork products he sold to his neighbours for their personal consumption.

China

Netflix released a new version of the classic science fiction book 3 Body Problem and ran into a storm of criticism from China for its depictions of the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution. Although most of the victims of the purges were killed by shooting, live burial, drowning, boiling alive, and disembowelling, there is evidence that several hundred had been cannibalised, as the ultimate in humiliation.

The General who presided over a Cultural Revolution massacre that included cannibalism of those deemed “enemies of the people”, Wei Guoqing, was reburied (or at least his ashes were) with full honours in Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery – the resting place of China’s high-ranking leaders and revolutionary heroes. Wei’s name is most strongly linked in the public mind with cannibalism during the massacre period in Guangxi’s Wuxuan and Wuming counties and Nanning city. Researchers have found that at least 137 people were eaten, with thousands participating. “Paying tribute to a legendary gourmet,” wrote one wag on social media.

Cuba

Stories began circulating this year that the extreme food shortages in Cuba were leading to the danger, or actual occurrence, of cannibalism. This was bolstered by reports from 2022 of two hospital workers who had been stealing hearts and fat from human bodies and selling them as mince.

Haiti

Rumours circulated that the natural disasters and gang violence in Haiti was leading to starvation cannibalism. Jimmy Cherizier, a gang leader called Barbecue (“Babekyou” in the local parlance) was known for his penchant for burning people alive, and there was at least one video on Twitter/X of one gang member supposedly “tearing flesh from the leg of a burning corpse and eating it.” Such stories cannot be selfishly maintained by one little country, so of course it was not long before Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of joining the cannibal feast. To add to the hilarity, Elon Musk posted on his own site, X, that a picture of a man near a fire was evidence of cannibalism, only to have the post removed by his own team for violating community standards. The fact-checking website Snopes pointed out that videos of bodies in Haiti being roasted on spits had previously appeared as accusations against a Nigerian restaurant, and were in fact from a Halloween prank in China in 2018. Still, you know, voodoo and all. Meanwhile, Trump ally Laura Loomer supplied conclusive proof that Haitians were cannibals: apparently, if you Google it, you will see a lot of results. The Prosecution rests its case.

India

India’s top court put a temporary stay on the execution of a man convicted of killing his mother and eating her remains in what is being deemed as the “rarest of rare” cases of cannibalism. Sunil Rama Kuchkoravi of western Maharashtra state’s Kolhapur district was handed a death penalty by a lower court in 2021 for killing his 63-year-old mother in 2017. The High Court in October this year upheld the death sentence against Kuchkoravi, stating that the convict possibly has a “syndrome of pathological cannibalism”. The execution has been delayed until the case is reheard in April 2025.

Israel (and around there)

Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, has been condemned for antisemitic rhetoric by the governments of the U.S., France and Germany among others. Albanese, known for accusing Israel of genocide (an odd charge seeing that the population of Gaza has increased in the last twelve months), wrote that the Israeli army was “rotten to the core”. A follower immediately introduced the classic blood libel: “Jews are capable of eating human flesh”, to which Albanese replied along the lines of “not all Jews”. Reassuring to note that a person paid by the taxpayers of the West, who finance the UN, can admit that some Jews are not cannibals!

A Yazidi woman was rescued from Gaza by Israeli troops. She revealed that, after being captured by ISIS in 2014 and forced to be sex slaves, the women were starved and finally fed meat which, they later told her, was from the bodies of a beheaded Yazidi baby, the child of one of the women. They told her:

‘We cooked your one-year-old son that we took from you, and this is what you just ate’.

Indonesia

Police investigated a suspected cannibalism case in West Java Province. The Head of the Criminal Investigation Unit confirmed that a video on social media showed the alleged perpetrator consuming a small portion of the victim’s flesh. He said that police had found 12 body parts of the victim at the crime scene.

Italy

An inmate in the notorious Poggioreale Prison in Naples tore the finger off another inmate and ate it. The Campania Guarantor, Samuele Ciambriello, observed that “it is now clear that the Poggioreale prison needs a structure suitable for hosting inmates suffering from mental disorders.” Seems like a good idea.

Mexico

A podcast called Mexico Unexplained revisited this year the story of Gabriela Rico Jiménez, a 21-year-old model from Mexico who disappeared some 15 years ago, after raging against the machine outside a fancy hotel in Monterrey Nuevo Leon. Ranting about the elites, including oddly the Queens of England and Germany (which is a Republic), she had shouted that “They ate humans! Disgusting!… They smell like human flesh!”

Nigeria

A man accused of being a sorcerer was blamed by villagers of the small town of Kirikiri for the disappearance of several children and elderly people. He was supposed to be “feeding on the flesh of the innocent.” Several claimed to have located the individual on the edge of a forest, wearing clothes “stained with blood” and mumbling mysterious incantations. A group of villagers beat the man and left him for dead.

Russia

Erkinzhon Abdurakhmanov, 47, intended to cure his own heart problems ‘after making a pact with the devil’, he told police. He killed a 65-year-old male pensioner in the Kuyurgazinsky district of Russian region Bashkortostan by striking him three times with an axe, according to reports. He then then cut out the heart and ‘ate the meal’ as he waited at a bus stop. He gave the uneaten remains to a woman also waiting for a bus ‘and asked her to bury it’. He was not arrested, however, until he headed into a liquor store and tried to steal some drinks. Cannibalism is not against the law in Russia, but murder and stealing alcohol is.

Vladimar Putin’s policy of giving pardons to criminals who agreed to fight in Ukraine in lieu of serving their sentences, was honoured in a pardon to a charmer named Denis Gorin, who had been convicted of at least four murders, and had eaten the flesh of his victims.

Another pardon involved Dmitri Malyshev. Malyshev was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2015 for multiple criminal offences. Ten years ago, he murdered an acquaintance, a Tajik native, and then filmed himself cutting the heart out of the victim and roasting it in a frying pan and eating it. Neighbours seemed uneasy about his imminent return home.

South Africa

On December 26, 2024, eight illegal miners known as zama zamas emerged from Shaft 10 of a mine near Stilfontein, located in Northwest South Africa. They were taken by police, who confirmed that twelve bodies remained trapped beneath the ground, with miners reportedly resorting to eating human flesh due to severe food shortages.

Ukraine

Novosibirsk Archpriest Alexander Novopashin became notorious for claiming that Ukrainians are “cannibals”. Although conspiracy theories about cannibals are becoming more common, this particular Archpriest is taken seriously in Russia, and regularly lectures Russian security forces and soldiers.

UK

Marius Gustavson, who called himself “the eunuch maker”, offered a service where he charged men to destroy or remove their testicles, and then charged subscribers to his website to see him perform the operations. The court heard that that there was “clear evidence” of cannibalism and that Gustavson had “cooked testicles for lunch in an artfully arranged salad platter”.

Meanwhile, a candidate from a party called Reform UK was suspended for saying that meat-eaters should “eat other humans” and said humanity should be “obliterated”. Just saying what many are thinking, perhaps.

USA

The cannibal story of the year was the President, Joe Biden, claiming that his uncle had been eaten by cannibals in New Guinea. The leaders of PNG took exception to the stereotyping of their people as cannibals. Apparently, only some of them had been.

Speaking of Presidents, Donald Trump embellished his rhetoric on immigration by pointing out that some of the undocumented people pouring over the border were from insane asylums, and called that “Silence of the Lambs stuff”. Trump had previously claimed that Hannibal Lecter had endorsed his candidacy, which is a bit odd since Hannibal is a fictional character, but by far not the oddest claim in the 2024 election.

In March, a homeless man in Kern County was arrested for picking up the leg of a person who had been killed in a train accident and chowing down on it. California has no laws against cannibalism, but he was charged with “mutilating the body” which is a bit odd, since the train had already done that.

In Utah, which also has no law against cannibalism (Idaho is the only state that does), a law was passed to criminalise the ‘ritual abuse of a child’, which apparently regularly includes making the little ones eat “organic substance or material” (i.e. bits of people) before they are allowed to have their desserts. This in addition to claims that such rituals would sometimes involve eating the children instead.

A keen-eyed traveller pointed out that the road once taken by the Donner Party, which ended up in them getting lost and eating each other, was now signposted with a sign indicating dining was available. Much hilarity ensued on social media.

Conservative political commentator Candace Owens managed to link transexuals, Native Americans and cannibals, all in one sentence. No wonder she is so widely admired.

Much to the relief of the good people of Idaho (the only State in the Union with laws against cannibalism), the law was amended to ensure that giving someone else human flesh to eat was also prohibited. This led, on its long road to farce, to the accusation that bodies were being turned into compost which could be used to grow food for humans to consume. Rather than DNA test all compost, the law confined itself to banning the act of deliberately giving human flesh to another person. The legislator who introduced the bill cited a disturbing case on the show TruTV, which she admitted might have been a prank (it was) in which diners were told they had been eating human flesh, just to whet their appetites perhaps.

Ariana Grande raised some eyebrows when she was asked on a podcast whom she would most like to dine, and named Jeffrey Dahmer. Not sure Dahmer would have agreed – he was more into man-flesh, and there’s not much meat on Ariana anyway.

In April, a man was arrested in Las Vegas for eating a victim’s eyeballs and ears. The victim was pronounced dead. What happens in Vegas stays – internal.

Talking of ears, Mike Tyson, famous for biting the ear of Evander Holyfield in a fight in (where else) las Vegas in 1997, released a line of marijuana gummies shaped like nibbled ears.

Allegations were raised that Gilgo Beach ‘serial killer’ Rex Heuermann’s family was involved in the murders, which took place near the remote beach town of Gilgo in Suffolk County, New York from the 1990s to 2011. His daughter, who likes to paint the odd Satanic scene including body parts and cannibal feasts, was accused of being involved in his depredations. Homicide experts said that was insane, a word that gets tossed around a lot in cannibal stories. Heuermann was charged with a seventh murder last week.

On October 9, a woman in Kentucky, Torilena May Fields, was arrested after a dismembered body was found behind a home in Northern Kentucky and cooked human body parts were found in the oven. The body, and its parts, turned out to have been her mother. She was also charged with cruelty in that she “intentionally tortured and killed a domestic dog.”. A contractor found the dismembered body of the mother, and told police the perp had been “casting spells.” Her bail was set at $1.5 million. Her next court appearance is set for March 10, 2025 in Robertson County.
Some people just give cannibalism a bad name.

Another Kentucky woman, a former youth counsellor, was arrested for allegedly discussing cannibalism and other hobbies with a convicted murderer.

In Oklahoma, Kevin Ray Underwood was executed by lethal injection in December (on his 45th birthday, the press gleefully informed us) for killing a ten-year-old girl in a “cannibalistic fantasy.” The man admitted to luring the girl into his apartment and beating her over the head with a cutting board before suffocating and sexually assaulting her. He told investigators that he nearly beheaded her in his bathtub before abandoning his plans to eat her. So not really a cannibalism story, but near enough.

International

Citizen of the world, Donald Duck, appeared on the interview show Hot Ones on the Internet (which is global), where guests eat chicken wings with hot sauce. Turns out Donald is a vegan though, preferring cauliflower, and since ducks aren’t chickens, the controversy that ensued over whether he was (or would have been) a cannibal by partaking of chicken was just silly.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, and may your worst problems be mild gastro-oesophageal reflux.

And don’t forget to go to the dentist.

Putin’s cannibals

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News2 Comments

Da, another one.

Dmitri Malyshev was recently released from a 25-year sentence for murder and cannibalism to fight on the Ukrainian front for the Russian “Storm V” and “Storm Z” forces.

The enormous number of casualties and shortage of Russian volunteer troops in Ukraine inspired Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” because he rose from being a restaurateur and caterer for the Kremlin, to scour the worst prisons in Russia and recruit murderers, rapists and cannibals for his army, the Wagner Group. They were dropped into the thick of the fighting, and promised a full pardon if they survived six months against the Ukrainian army. Prigozhin has since been killed, but the scheme apparently survives, now run by the Russian military.

The latest recruit is Dmitri Malyshev. Originally from Volgograd, Malyshev was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2015 for multiple criminal offences. Ten years ago, he murdered an acquaintance, a Tajik native, and then filmed himself cutting the heart out of the victim and roasting it in a frying pan and eating it. Malyshev, part of an organized criminal group, had previously killed two businessmen for their money.

In the video, Malyshev said:

“We’re roasting a human. Here it is – a heart. I’ve already added the onion.”

Malyshev subsequently apologized for his actions, “carried out under the influence of alcohol.” Well, that’s OK then. Who hasn’t acted ill-advisedly after a few drinks and eaten a friend?

In March 2024, Malyshev took a photo in Ukraine with another participant in the war, Alexander Maslennikov from Volzhsky, who was convicted in 2017 for stabbing to death two girls he met at a karaoke joint, dismembering them, and hiding them in the forest, for which he received a 22-year sentence. In 2023, residents of Volgograd and Volzhsky expressed their fear on social media about Maslennikov’s potential return to the region.

During his conversation with V1 journalists, Malyshev confirmed that he had served his prison term alongside Maslennikov, and they both signed a military contract in October 2023. Malyshev was deployed to the ‘Storm V’ unit. The cannibal asserted that he had decided to “fight for the preservation of traditional Russian values.” He added that he came to Ukraine to “fight” against sex education in schools and gays.

Malyshev is currently in hospital. He told reporters:

“A grenade landed on me during an assault manoeuvre. I have a broken jaw, shrapnel in my knee and left hand and my left eardrum burst. Nothing to see here.”

Other cannibals purportedly sent to fight in Ukraine include:

  • Yegor Komarov, who confessed to killing a man so he could eat his tongue fried in butter
  • Nikolai Ogolobyak, a Satanist who, with his followers, killed four college students and ate their internal organs in a ritual feast
  • Denis Gorin, who killed and ate parts of at least three victims, although parts of around twelve bodies were found

From Putin’s point of view, it’s an ideal solution. Why feed these guys (even if not very lavishly) for the next twenty years or so, when they can go off and be killed or else fend for themselves, finding their own sources of meat and onions? And, if they happen to survive the hellish battles in which they are dropped, then they are ‘pardoned’ and sent home where, more than likely, their victims’ relatives may have plans for them. From a military point of view, too, they have proved that the life of a human is worth no more to them than any other kind of edible animal, which, together with having nothing to lose, makes them ideal killing machines.

The Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications summarised:

“…there is no article ‘cannibalism’ in the legislation of the Russian Federation. Perhaps that is why the dehumanization of Russians has already acquired a literal meaning.”

Meat the twenty-first century version of super-soldiers.

Cannibalism News 2024: Putin pardons more cannibals

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News2 Comments

Another Russian convicted of murder and cannibalism has been pardoned by Vladimir Putin after fighting in the Ukraine.

Denis Gorin (Денис Горин), from the city of Aniva, Sakhalin region, was recruited into a private military company after signing a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defence. He is known to have been convicted three times for murdering at least four people between 2003 and 2022. He and his brother were also convicted of eating the remains of his victims. Gorin killed his victims, then washed and refrigerated the remains. After his last conviction in 2018, Gorin was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

However, at least seventeen convicted murderers have been pardoned by the Russian President since 2022 for agreeing to serve in the war on Ukraine. A neighbour of Gorin, Dmitry Vladimirovich, said that Gorin was now free and had been admitted to a military hospital in the eastern Russian city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk due to a moderate injury. The neighbour added that the victims’ relatives are likely to arrange a lynching.

“He’s basically free, pardoned, and half his sentence has been wiped out. But I don’t think he’ll stay free for long. His victims’ relatives remember everything.”

The first murder was in 2003.

“At the trial, he admitted that they ate the murdered man; he was their acquaintance. They killed him because they were drunk, and then the elder brother, Evgeniy (he had already tasted human flesh by that time), tried to force his wife to eat it. Then – his younger brother, Denis. According to Denis, he refused, but his brother threatened to kill him too. Then he started eating.”

After that first murder, Gorin was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, but released after seven years due to “exemplary behaviour”. Gorin returned to Aniva where he stabbed to death the brother of another prisoner with whom he was in the pre-trial detention centre. After the murder, according to the case file, he “decided to remember the past, namely, to cut off the meat from [the victim] and subsequently eat it.”

In 2011, Denis Gorin and his brother killed a man and hid his body on the banks of the Lyutoga River, and at the beginning of 2012 they committed another murder, according to the regional prosecutor’s office. This was proven five years later. In 2018, the court sentenced Denis Gorin to 22 years of imprisonment in a special regime colony for the last three murders. The neighbour reported that:

“This came up by chance; they also tried to kill one local while they were drunk, but they couldn’t. When they were detained, (I was present), they opened the refrigerator, and it was filled to the brim with human meat! He told us right there how he cut meat from the legs of the dead, looked at the biceps to see if there was meat there. They showed the hole where the remains were buried – there were 12 people there. Not three, as stated in the verdict! And among the skeletons there was a very small one – some girl was killed. But we couldn’t prove it in court.”

In 2023, Putin pardoned him. Pro-Kremlin media has ignored the news of the cannibal’s pardon. Nevertheless, it appears sporadically on social networks and instant messengers.

“Maniacs are real. His brother was killed while still in prison, and this brother didn’t even serve five years, but is already free. Maybe he’ll be patient for a year, and then he’ll start killing again.”

A photo on Gorin’s social media profile on Odnoklassniki – a Russian social media platform shows him wearing a military uniform with the letter Z emblazoned on the sleeve, a pro-war symbol for conflicts in Ukraine and abroad widely used in Russia.

Another man, Nikolai Ogolobyak, a self-confessed Satanist, was convicted of ritual murders, and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2019 for murdering four teenagers and then consuming their remains. The 33-year-old man was reportedly pardoned by the Russian president for fighting in Ukraine.

This blog reported on another jailed cannibal, Yegor Komarov, who was purportedly released to fight in Ukraine in 2022. 

Russia’s Defence Ministry and the Wagner mercenary group have recruited heavily from Russian prisons to the notorious “Storm Z” unit of convicts, to bolster their manpower in Ukraine, promising convicts a pardon in exchange for military service. Several of these pardoned convicts have reportedly committed new crimes after returning from Ukraine. And returned soldiers do tend to come home undernourished and voraciously hungry.

Satanist cannibal released after fighting in Ukraine

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The Moscow Times has reported that a self-confessed member of a Satanist sect, who was serving a twenty-year prison sentence for murder and the desecration of dead bodies, has been freed after completing six months of military service in Ukraine.

Nikolai Ogolobyak and other Satan worshippers, including one nicknamed “Hitler,” beheaded two of their four victims — then removed their hearts and tongues, fried and ate them. 

In a second case in which they killed two other people, Ogolobyak made 666 stabs on his victim as an apparent reference to the ‘number of the beast’, a symbol of the devil.

Ogolobyak, 33, from the Yaroslavl region, was released earlier this month after he was severely injured in battle, his father said. His prison sentence had been set to end in 2030. His father told the press:

“He is not working. He is recovering. It is unlikely that he will be taken to the ‘special military operation’ again.”

Ogolobyak and his underage accomplices were sentenced in 2010 for killing four teenagers and desecrating their bodies in 2008 initiation rituals. Another suspect, Anton Makovkin, was ruled insane and was placed in a mental institution. The ritualistic murders rocked the Yaroslavl region — where the then-teenage Ogolbyak was known as “Count.”

Other members included Alexei “Dead” Chistyakov; Anton “Doctor Goth” Makovkin; Sergey “Distris” Karpenko, and Alexander “Hitler” Voronov”.

For the first two years, the teen Satanist carried out bloody rituals by sacrificing stray dogs and cats. Initially, new members were inducted into the cult using the blood of slaughtered animals, which were tied to an upside-down cross.

But in the summer of 2008, the Satanists went out hunting for people to sacrifice — and wound up killing and dismembering four college students they had befriended: Olga Pukhova, Anna Gorokhova, Andrej Sorokin and Varya Kuzmina.

On June 28, 2008, after a night of drinking, Pukhova and Gorokhova were lured to a clearing, where the cult members started a bonfire and positioned themselves in a pentagram formation, according to documents filed in the case.

When one of them gave a sign, all the suspects fell upon the two young women and plunged daggers into their bodies. Makovkin then decapitated the girls with a sword, after which the mutilated corpses were dismembered and carved up, and several internal organs were fried and eaten, according to the court records.

The newest member of the group, Ksenia “Kara” Kovaleva, was bathed in the victims’ blood as part of her initiation ceremony. One of the suspects was known in the group as “the secretary from hell” who took notes in a book of made from the skin of the victims.

Russia’s Defence Ministry and the Wagner mercenary group have recruited heavily from Russian prisons to the notorious “Storm Z” unit of convicts, to bolster their manpower in Ukraine, promising convicts a pardon in exchange for military service. Several of these pardoned convicts have reportedly committed new crimes after returning from Ukraine.

According to leading prisoner’s rights activist Olga Romanova, around 80,000 convicts were recruited from Russian prisons, and 20-30,000 have already returned to civilian life. The Kremlin has reiterated that they will keep the pardoning practice active for the foreseeable future.

Dmitri Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, defended these pardons, believing that “people convicted, including for serious crimes, atone for their crime with blood on the battlefield.”

This blog reported on another jailed cannibal, Yegor Komarov, who was purportedly released to fight in Ukraine in 2022. It now appears that the cannibal sent to fight in the Ukraine may actually have been Ogolobyak.

 The Times reports that Russians are increasingly uneasy about the release of killers on the basis that they served in the army. Particularly, one must assume, cannibal Satanists.

Criminals becoming “real cannibals” in Ukraine?

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In October 2022, thecannibalguy blog reported on the news that Russia has been boosting the number of soldiers fighting in Ukraine by recruiting within its worst maximum-security prisons, including enlisting a convicted cannibal.

The cannibal, Yegor Komarov, had been the subject of an earlier blog in December 2021. He had been arrested for murder in the town of Sortavala (near the Finnish border) after a headless body fell from his car. Komarov admitted to being a cannibal and confessed to stabbing and killing another man in a St Petersburg park the previous year for the sole purpose of tasting human flesh, adding that he had sliced off the victim’s tongue and fried it in butter.

The recruiters of this motley army of murderers, rapists (and at least one cannibal), all of who are promised freedom if they survive six months of war, is a mercenary force called The Wagner Group. It had first been deployed to the Ukraine back in 2014 to help pro-Russian separatists battle Ukrainian forces.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” because he rose from being a restaurateur and caterer for the Kremlin, is the leader of the Wagner Group. Many of Mr Prigozhin’s companies are currently under US sanctions for what it calls his “malign political and economic influence around the globe”. 

Prigozhin originally denied any connection with the Wagner Group, but now a new video has surfaced (at the top of this page) where he shows how his mercenaries are trained before being sent in as the shock troops of the Russian war to occupy Ukraine.

In the video, Prigozhin speaks about so-called “elite” fighters from a special training base in the village of Molkino in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia:

This is a supplementary training base for our fighters…. Here experienced fighters are given additional training in their specialties. So they raise young eagles there, and here they make real cannibals.

These prisoners from the worst Russian prisons are considered disposable, sent into the front lines in Ukraine as cannon fodder. According to the Ukrainian President, after the fighting around the Soledar salt mines in January 2023,

“Thousands of their people were lost: the whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes. This is what madness looks like.”

Commanders of the brutal mercenary group are reportedly castrating their own soldiers who try to surrender or retreat. In an intercepted call in December 2022, US intelligence said that they learned a member of the Wagner Group was castrated for either trying to retreat or surrender. The intercepted call heard a Russian soldier say, “The Wagnerians caught him and cut his fucking balls off” but the video tape was not released.

We have no reports yet about the fate of the recruited cannibal, Yegor Komarov, nor do we know if he is finding ‘gainful’ employment teaching other recruits how to be “real cannibals”.

We do know that cannibalism is a recurring event in Russian and Ukrainian history, particularly in the last hundred years. Russia’s worst serial killer was a cannibal named Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted of killing fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990, although he had confessed to many more. Chikatilo blamed his cannibalism fetish on the story his mother had told him about his brother being taken and eaten by the neighbours in the 1930s, during the Holodomor.

The “Holodomor” (literally “murder by starvation”) was an event that took place in the Ukraine in 1932-3, during which the population was deliberately decimated by Stalin’s collectivisation of the farms and seizure of food stores. As starvation set in, corpses began to disappear, and the government response was simply to put up signs saying, “Eating dead children is barbarism”.

Not so in war, apparently. What exactly Yevgeny Prigozhin meant by turning his soldiers into “real cannibals” is not clear. But in view of his total disregard for their welfare, we have to wonder how well Prigozhin feeds his soldiers. Or, as Putin’s chef, does he simply give them a recipe book?

2022 CANNIBAL NEWS and VIEWS

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What a year! These are some of the cannibalism stories, films and songs that arrived in 2022, with links back to the original reports, so that you can look up the ones that catch your interest, and so that this blog does not take all of 2023 to read.

January

  • A German man dubbed by the press the ‘cannibal teacher’ was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Stefan R., a 41-year-old maths and chemistry teacher, had apparently searched on the dark web for terms such as “long pig” and “fatten and slaughter people”. The man claimed his victim died of natural causes after a (presumably vigorous) sexual tryst, and he had removed the man’s penis “since my DNA could still have possibly been present due to the oral sex I performed”. In other words, he didn’t mind a bit of mutilation and perhaps cannibalism, but was concerned not to be “outed” as gay.
  • Djalma Campos Figueiredo, 46, was arrested in Brazil. He had been sentenced by the Court of Justice of Rondonia in the city of Porto Velho to 42 years in prison for several counts of aggravated murder but had escaped custody. The Civil Police alleged he would eat his victims’ eyes and ears and drink their blood.
  • Meanwhile, the Zamfara (NW Nigeria) State Police Command arrested a 57-year-old man, Aminu Baba, for allegedly eating and selling human body parts. Baba and three others were arrested after the murder of a nine-year-old boy. The Police Commissioner reported that Baba had “confessed that he usually ate the body parts and identified the throat as the most delicious part. He also sold some of the human parts to his customers.”

February

  • In Afghanistan, we discovered that the Taliban were rounding up drug addicts and putting them in rehabilitation centres to detox, which is a nice thought, except that they gave them little or no food (“cold turkey” does not count), so they apparently resorted to cannibalism.

April

We have been following the case of an Idaho man, James David Russell, who was accused of killing and eating a neighbour in September 2021. This was a big deal for us in Cannibal Studies, because Idaho is still the only state in the Union to have a law against cannibalism, a statute that hit the books in 1990, but has never been used. In April, Russell was deemed fit to stand trial.

  • In the Indian state of Assam, a man who had had perhaps more than a few drinks smelt cooking meat in a crematorium in a Hindu cremation ground. He helped himself to a few portions of the body, but was caught by villagers and handed over to police; but not before he had eaten about half of his purloined flesh.

May

  • A man calling himself The Chinese Zodiac Killer was arrested by the FBI in Jefferson County, New York for sending letters to media outlets, government offices including the White House, and other organisations, claiming he killed people and ate their flesh, and that he plans to kill more. He seems to have based his story on the Zodiac killer who terrorised California in the late 1960s. The original Zodiac Killer (who was not accused of cannibalism) was never caught, but this one was easily found, posting his threatening letters (what century is this again?) at the same letterbox he had previously used.

June

  • The case against James David Russell (see above in April) went to preliminary trial. Sadly, the judge threw out the charge of cannibalism, saying there was insufficient evidence to pursue it, and went with the rather more mundane offence of first-degree murder. Since this has a life sentence attached, the practical effect of dropping the cannibalism charge is negligible, but as the first cannibalism case in the USA, it would have been fascinating.
  • A rumour swept the Internet that the actress Anne Hathaway was a cannibal, based on a cryptic Tweet saying “police didn’t find human remains and evidence of cannibalism in her LA home that she sold in 2013.” We were all later astonished to discover the whole thing was a hoax.
  • The effects of the war in The Ukraine were starting to be felt in Europe and the UK (whose people often do not think it’s part of Europe). The Russians fell gladly on a statement from one Jeremy Clarkson (a car enthusiast) that “Hunger makes people eat their neighbours” to predict that the British will soon be a nation of cavemen feeding off each other. Of course, if you’ve ever been to a soccer match…
  • industrial/electronic music duo SKYND released their tenth song, called ARMIN MEIWES, about the German man who killed and ate a willing volunteer.
  • Back in the USA, the Utah County Attorney felt he had to go public to deny accusations that he and his wife are cannibals. Honest. I wouldn’t/couldn’t make this stuff up.

July

  • The New York Times raised the temperature of the culture wars with its review of several books, movies and TV shows about cannibalism, culminating in the (somewhat tongue in cheek) statement that “Cannibalism has a time and place… that time is now.” The right-wing press predictably jumped on the story accusing the NYT of everything from irresponsibility to Satanism.
  • Also in New York, Steven Spielberg whipped out his cell phone to record Marcus Mumford singing his new work, a haunting song called “CANNIBAL“. The song might be about love and lockdown, or it could involve child abuse.

August

September

  • DISCOVERY+ launched a three-part series called HOUSE OF HAMMER. The series explored allegations from various girlfriends of the actor Armie Hammer that he was a cannibal, or had at least threatened them with cannibalism. It also examined his relatives, many of whom seemed to be presented as even worse specimens than Armie.
  • Russia discovered the war was not going well in Ukraine, and started recruiting murderers and rapists to be sent to the front as reinforcements. Also – one cannibal, Yegor Komarov, whose man-eating exploits we learned about in December 2021.

October

  • In the Indian state of Kerala, there were allegations that a couple who ran a massage centre were bringing women home not so much for massages, but for human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism.
  • In the US state of Michigan, Mark David Latunski, who had been arrested in 2019 for killing and eating his Grindr date, finally came to trial and entered a plea of guilty.

November

  • Issei Sagawa, the “Kobe Cannibal”, died of pneumonia at the age of 73. Sagawa had killed and eaten a young Dutch fellow-student in Paris in 1981. He was found insane and sent back to Japan, where he was released and lived free ever since, making movies, writing books, and even becoming a restaurant reviewer.
  • Rapper Comethazine released Bawskee 5, the 12th song on which was called “CANNIBAL“.
  • Back in Brazil again! A patient in the Municipal Hospital of Nuovo Hamburgo in the state of Rio Grande do Sul attacked other patients, screamed and spat at people, and eventually chewed off his own fingers and toes. A witness said “while he was chewing his own meat, you could hear the crackling of bones in his mouth”.

December

  • Mark Latunski, 52, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on December 15 for the murder of his Grindr date three years previously. Kevin Bacon, 25, had been killed and mutilated by Latunski on December 24, 2019 at Latunski’s Bennington home. Latunski pleaded guilty in September to killing Bacon and eating one of his testicles, after stabbing him in the back and slitting his throat. In a victims’ impact statement, the victim’s father said “Evil does exist, and it touched us.”

On the screen

The big news on streaming television this year was Jeffrey Dahmer, the “Milwaukee Cannibal”, who took Netflix by storm with not one but two titles, despite having been killed by a fellow prisoner in 1994.

  • Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s docudrama called “MONSTER: THE JEFFREY DAHMER STORY“, which logged nearly two hundred million hours of watching in its first week of release
  • Joe Berlinger’s third series of CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER, featuring previously unheard defence attorney tapes of interviews with Dahmer.

Lots of new cannibalism feature films in 2022, some of which I will catch up with next year:

  • Luca Guadagnino’s BONES AND ALL, featuring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as teenage cannibals in a tender and gory road movie, has been getting heaps of publicity.
  • Mimi Cave’s FRESH is a charming romcom, until the knives come out. A fascinating insight into ultimate consumerism.
  • Leatherface came back (again!), this time older but no wiser. This is the ninth (!) instalment of the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE franchise, and went straight to Netflix.
  • John Ainslie’s DO NOT DISTURB depicts a couple renewing their romance by taking peyote, but finding that this particular variant of the drug awakens a taste for human flesh.
  • Leatherface came out to play again, this time as a fan-film prequel called THE SAWYER MASSACRE. Made on a shoestring but arguably superior to the other sequels and prequels.
  • Liam Regan’s EATING MISS CAMPBELL, in which a vegan, goth student falls in love with her new English teacher and develops a taste for human flesh.
  • Sean Patrick Flanery’s enjoyable road movie FRANK AND PENELOPE, in which a couple take on a cannibal cult in the wilds of Texas.
  • Timo Vuorensola’s JEEPERS CREEPERS REBORN, the umpteenth take on a supernatural tale of the demon who eats people and incorporates their bodies, but only every 23 years.
  • Fred Olen Ray’s PIRANHA WOMEN offers a totally believable story of women who turn into man-eaters because of an anti-cancer treatment.
  • THE MENU has Ralph Fiennes as a demented chef and Anya Taylor-Joy as the fly, as it were, in his menu plan. There is no obvious cannibalism involved in the movie, but there is some speculation on-line about the final cheeseburger.
  • ‘Ted Lasso goes cannibal’ in Adam Leader & Richard Oakes’ FEED ME, a jolly rant in which a grieving man wants to die, and a nearby cannibal wants to help him, but by instalment.

And now for something completely different

From out of the future, we have some new AI software of which Shital Shah, a senior research engineer at Microsoft, said:

ChatGPT is “a large language model that has been trained to generate human-like responses to text input.” In other words, you can ask it questions and receive (often) intelligent answers, rather than a series of links, like Google. You can try it for free (at the moment) here.

Naturally, I asked it questions such as “is meat murder” and it replied:

“Ultimately, whether or not eating meat is considered murder is a matter of personal belief and moral judgement.”

So, I barked back, like a prosector out for a conviction, “Where does that leave the cannibal?”

“Whether or not eating other humans is considered murder would also be a matter of personal belief and moral judgement. Most people would consider cannibalism to be morally reprehensible, as it involves the killing and consuming of another human being. However, there may be some individuals who do not see it that way, and their personal beliefs and moral judgement would dictate their view on the matter.”

The Internet has spoken, at last.

PUTIN SENDS A CANNIBAL TO FIGHT IN UKRAINE

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The war in the Ukraine has been one of the dominant news stories of 2022. At the time of the invasion in February 2022, Russia, a supposed military superpower, was expected to crush the much smaller Ukrainian military and swallow up the country in a matter of days. Cannibalise it, one might say.

However, the reality, after months of fighting, was that Russia did not achieve a quick victory, and might not even keep the territory it has taken. In the meantime, both sides have suffered significant losses of fighters, equipment and infrastructure. The Ukrainians estimated in mid-September that over 50,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far.

The news this month (September 2022) is that Russia has mobilised around 300,000 “reservists” – civilians who have completed their mandatory military service, but will now be dragged back into uniform. There are two million reservists in Russia, so this is only a partial mobilisation, but it shows a level of desperation in Putin’s war machine.

But it turns out that Russia has been boosting the number of soldiers for some time, by recruiting within its worst maximum-security prisons.

A mercenary army called The Wagner Group deployed to the Ukraine back in 2014 to help pro-Russian separatists fight Ukrainian forces. British military intelligence reports that there are 1,000 mercenaries fighting there. The group has also been active in Syria and Africa, and has repeatedly been accused of war crimes and human rights abuses. They are now fighting alongside Russian regular troops in the Donbas region.

A BBC investigation identified Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” – so-called because he rose from being a restaurateur and caterer for the Kremlin – as a key figure in the Wagner Group. Many of Mr Prigozhin’s companies are currently under US sanctions for what it calls his “malign political and economic influence around the globe”. He has denied any connection with the Wagner Group.

Now a leading expert in Russia’s prison system, Olga Romanova, in the media group “Vazhnye istorii” (Важные истории or Important Stories) has reported that prisoners from the jails around St. Petersburg are being recruited to go to war in Ukraine as part of the “Wagner” army. Romanova states that Prigozhin has been visiting Russian prison camps in order to enlist convicted criminals to fight in Ukraine, according to accounts from military analysts and videos that have emerged on Telegram from Russian prisons. Romanova told The Daily Beast website:

“Putin’s plan is to recruit at least 50,000 convicts and Prigozhin, who is an ex-convict himself, has already sent more than 3,000 [including] serial murderers, robbers and at least one cannibal.”

Relatives of the prisoners report that the inmates are being promised that if the “volunteer” dies, they will pay the family 5 million roubles. If they live for six months of “service”, they will receive a payment of 200,000 roubles and a full pardon. A chilling thought for the victims (and their relatives) of the crimes which caused them to be in the prison camps!

“In 1/2 a year you go home with a pardon… there’s no way you end up back in prison. Those who arrive on the first day and don’t like where they’ve ended up are considered deserters and get shot.”

In Ukraine, Prigozin’s army is often referred to as an “army of orcs and goblins,” a reference to Lord of the Rings. “They take everyone, no matter what they are in prison for,” said Romanova in a video on the “Popular Politics” YouTube channel, as translated by The New Voice of Ukraine.

“They took a maniac who, so to speak, has cannibalism in his portfolio. He was also sent to war.”

Now authoritative sources (Twitter) tells us that the cannibal who has been recruited by the Wagner Group for the war in Ukraine is none other than Yegor Komarov, about whom this blog reported in December 2021. Komarov had been arrested in the town of Sortavala (near the Finnish border) after running from his crashed car, from the boot of which had tumbled a headless corpse. Komarov admitted to being a cannibal and stated that he ‘likes killing people’. He confessed to stabbing and killing another man in a park in St Petersburg the previous year for the sole purpose of tasting human flesh, and said he had sliced off the tongue and fried it in butter.

He sounds like a perfect guest at a dinner party for Putin, catered of course by Prigozhin, “Putin’s chef”.

Cannibalism in the Ukraine: GHOUL (Petr Jákl, 2015)

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Ghoul is a “found footage” movie, a postmodern affectation that pretends it is a documentary that has been ‘found’ after some gruesome disaster. The genre was popularised (although not originated) by the Blair Witch Project in 1999 which, like Ghoul, had young film-makers heading off to investigate the paranormal, and wishing they hadn’t. One of its most famous antecedents was Cannibal Holocaust in 1980, which was purportedly a documentary about missing documentary makers, and was (purportedly) believable enough to lead to a court case in which the actors had to be produced to prove they had not in fact been killed in some sort of snuff movie. This was of course great publicity for the film, as was the fact that it had been banned in several jurisdictions. The very first film in the genre was probably Punishment Park in 1971, in which anti-Vietnam War demonstrators are supposedly dropped in the desert and hunted by Nixon’s cops.

The main point of interest in this film (the found footage itself being unoriginal and totally preposterous) is the fact that it is set in The Ukraine which, at the time of writing, is again suffering from decisions taken in Moscow. The “Holodomor” (literally “murder by starvation”) was an event that took place in the Ukraine in 1932-3, during which the population was deliberately decimated by the collectivisation of the farms and seizure of food stores. As starvation set in, corpses began to disappear, and the government response was simply to put up signs saying, “Eating dead children is barbarism”. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, the history of Nazi and Soviet mass murders between the wars, examines the incidents of cannibalism in the Ukraine and Poland, and concludes “With starvation will come cannibalism”. When there is no bread or other meat, human flesh becomes the currency. Snyder describes several reports, including an orphanage in Kharkiv where the older children began eating the youngest, who himself joined in, “tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could.”

Pretty difficult to invent a story worse than such a reality. So to add some spice, we have in Ghoul an amateur film crew from America who are fascinated by cannibalism (as, apparently, are very many people: this blog is currently receiving over 10,000 views per month – THANK YOU for reading!) They are researching evidence of cannibalism during the Holodomor, as part of a planned television series on cannibals of the twentieth century. They are conducting interviews in Kyiv of elderly survivors of that time, but they are also hoping to interview a man named Boris who was arrested rather more recently for eating a colleague, confessed to the crime under hypnosis, but then was released, as the body was never found. He said that he was made to do it. By whom, they wonder.

The crew are taken to a local psychic/witch, who tells them that paranormal entities were behind that murder. The crew dismisses this as superstition, getting drunk and getting her to perform a séance involving a pentagram, in which they mockingly summon the ghost of Andrei Chikatilo, a notorious serial killer and cannibal who killed and partially consumed dozens of women and children in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The next morning is full of strange and uncanny events, but the crew are unable to leave for help. The Ukrainian psychic tries but fails to evict Chikatilo’s presence, with no luck: he’s back now, and killing again. The idea is that Chikatilo forced Boris, their reluctant interviewee, to kill and eat his victim. He possesses (as in takes over the body of) a cat, then Boris, who proceeds to chase the young filmmakers, screaming, through various dark, gothic passages.

WTF? (Or що за біса as they say in The Ukraine). The film’s poster (below) says “INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS”. But where is the connection between Stalin’s attempted genocide in the 1930s and the ghost of a cannibal who had been active in Russia in the 1970s and 80s and was executed by a bullet behind his ear in 1994? Well, turns out Chikatilo had a brother that disappeared during the famine, and his ever-loving mummy told him the brother had been kidnapped and eaten. This may have just been to make him behave better (spoiler: didn’t work very well). So anyway, he decided to become a cannibal, specialising in small children. A real piece of work, and not one you’d want to reawaken from the dead.

I find hand-held filming annoying even in the hands of an expert, and this lot are supposed to be a bit sloppy, so the picture is jumping all over the place, to the point of seasickness. Reminds me of my dad’s Super-8 home movies (although he didn’t have a cannibal ghost to film, just bored kids). If you are patient enough to put up with the soundtrack (annoying bangs meant to scare you) and the shaky camera, the concept of a massacre being presented through the dispassionate eye of a video camera is interesting, in that it could be interpreted as the way the universe indifferently watches the suffering of its animals as they eat each other or, more immediately, the way the world watches as Russia tries to cannibalise Ukraine.

But besides the irritating camera work and the noisy things that go bump in the night, the plot is absurd – you have a historical tragedy, an imaginary murderer and the supposed ghost of a real murderer, who is somehow able to take over cats, people (including during sex) and of course kill people. The whole thing is frankly a bit of a yawn. It somehow managed to get to 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the LA Times critic summing it up well:

“Ghoul” can’t decide whether it should be about cannibals, serial killers, ghosts or demons. The found footage trivializes rather than reflects the horrific events that serve as the film’s basis.

According to IMDB, Ghoul was the highest grossing horror in Czech history. It also won the Vicious Cat Award at the Grossmann film and wine festival. Not sure if that will impress you or not.

The full movie was available on YouTube last time I checked, but all the dialog is in Czech and Ukrainian. Even if you speak both fluently, I wouldn’t bother.

“Reports of widespread cannibalism” – NO BLADE OF GRASS (Cornell Wilde, 1970)

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Cities are locked down, citizens are trying to escape from a deadly virus, food is rationed, rumours abound of dark government plots to kill off sections of the population. No, it’s not a COVID-19 movie but a speculative fiction film from over fifty years ago. From the trailer (above):

“Mankind destroyed what made most of the world liveable. Nature – wounded, diseased, and enraged – took revenge on her murderers. She cut off their food supply, and then waited, while they consumed each other.”

Yes, it’s a cannibal film based on a cannibal book, and its premise is the human war against nature, the way victory inevitably turns into defeat, and then perhaps extinction. The book it was based on, The Death of Grass by John Christopher, came out in 1956, which makes it quite prescient, and a bit of a shame more people didn’t read it back then, when carbon dioxide levels were 314 parts per million, compared to today’s 422ppm. Here’s a quote from that book:

“…he could no longer believe that there would be any last-minute reprieve for mankind. First China, and then the rest of Asia, and now Europe. The others would fall in their turn, incredulous, it might be, to the end. Nature was wiping a cloth across the slate of human history, leaving it empty for the pathetic scrawls of those few who, here and there over the face of the globe, would survive.”

Those who did take it seriously were film-makers like Ray Milland, who made Panic in Year Zero! in 1962 with a very similar plot, and this one, No Blade of Grass, an adaptation of Christopher’s book made by the acclaimed American actor turned director Cornell Wilde, whose 1965 film The Naked Prey was in many ways a forerunner of the Italian “Cannibal Boom” films of the 1970s and 1980s.

The film, set in the UK, starts with scenes of environmental destruction, as did its more famous American rival Soylent Green three years later. Soylent Green specifically nominated global warming as the cause of the collapse of the food system, due to the human population peaking in a way Thomas Malthus might have found terrifying.

In No Blade of Grass, it’s a virus sweeping the globe (right up to date, again); this one is killing all the grasses, including wheat, oats, barley, rye and rice, the food staples, without which the human species (and many other animals) will starve. We’re already getting a taste of this, as discussed in last week’s blog, with the blockade of Ukraine, the grains from which make up a majority of the food supplies for some of the poorer countries.

Of course, that is ‘over there’ and while we can feel sorry for the starving masses, we also have remote controls so we can turn off the sad news and enjoy our dinners. Just so, in this film we get unsubtle examples of starving children, interposed with rich, entitled, white British folks scoffing their roast beef and looking superior as they hear the news from overseas where, we are told, 600 million people have died of starvation, and the Chinese government is using nerve gas to kill 300 million of their own citizens to keep the state from total anarchy. The news continues:

“In the countries which no longer have any form of government, there are reports of widespread cannibalism.”

But even the comfortably bourgeois patriarch John Custance (Nigel Davenport) is making plans, in his light-hearted, Pythonesque way, to take his family up to visit his brother in the country. Do come along, old boy, he tells his daughter’s boyfriend, a scientist who has insider knowledge of what’s going to happen, because:

Anarchy breaks out in London and major cities. Fighting their way out of London, John and his family adopt the savagery of the collapsing society, robbing and killing those who stand in their way.

The car is stopped and John is knocked unconscious, while his wife (Jean Wallace, Cornel Wilde’s wife and frequent collaborator) and daughter (Lynne Frederick, later to be the last of the many wives of Peter Sellers) are raped. This rape scene, not the famine and cannibalism, turned out to be the controversial part of the movie, since Lynne Frederick was only 15 at the time. Nevertheless, Michael never loses his eyepatch or his cool or his alpha masculinity, while the women mostly do what they are told, and their hair remains perfectly coiffed.

A short-wave radio news bulletin reports:

“All the evidence indicates that France, Germany, Italy, in fact all of Western Europe along with a major part of Asia, South America and Africa have ceased to exist as part of the civilised world. In the midst of complete anarchy, and mass starvation, the horrors of cannibalism are already widespread.”

Only America and Canada are left, in the words of the US President, to “survive and preserve… the heritage of man’s greatness.”

When they finally arrive at John’s brother’s farm after a battle with a bikie gang that seems to owe more to the early Western than to science fiction, they have collected a whole lot of salt-of-the-earth farmers, whom the brother is not pleased to see, as he doesn’t want to feed them. The final showdown is therefore a modern iteration of Cain and Abel – the battle of the brothers.

The really odd thing about this cannibal film is that, while we witness the descent of civilised British gentlefolk into savagery, we never see any actual cannibalism. We hear a lot about it occurring in other countries, and speculation about it being about to happen at home, but the British seem to find each other particularly unappetising.

Cornell Wilde was an activist director, intent on convincing his audiences that the world was going pear-shaped in a hurry, and he was not big on subtlety. Unfortunately, the audience expects not just social commentary but also entertainment, and despite a lot of shooting and explosions and murders and rapes, the film suffered from some wooden dialogue and irritating flash-forwards which extinguished any suspense. The film received a desultory score of just 40% on Rotten Tomatoes.

No Blade of Grass is over fifty years old, which doesn’t excuse but partly explains the overt sexism, classism and racism that it addresses while also often seeming to endorse. Yet the film’s environmental theme is even more current today than it was on its release fifty years ago. Pollution is killing off agriculture, the water is contaminated and unfit for drinking, animals are dying out everywhere. The two little boys in the car even mention global warming, years before most of us had heard of it.

When COVID hit in 2020, people queued for food and water and guns and (most urgently) toilet paper, and there was much talk of famine, the breakdown of social order and, inevitably, the rise of cannibalism, just as we see in this film (although being British, they never discuss or seemingly require toilet paper). With no grains and no domesticated animals, people naturally turn to the only available meat, that which grows on the ape called Homo sapiens. But fifty years on, we don’t seem to have learnt anything from such speculations.

The film ends with a narrator announcing:

“This motion picture is not a documentary; but it could be.”

Indeed.