Controversial Russian cartoons show Putin's enemies violently killed

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Chuvashia regional leader Mikhail Ignatyev in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Friday, Jan. 29, 2016. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russia has released a series of bizarre cartoons showing Vladimir Putin’s political rivals being brutally killed.

The clips show well known political figures meeting their grisly ends after being accused of crimes such as corruption and abuse of office.

Incredibly, the animations were released by the All-Russia People’s Front (ONF) – the political movement founded by Putin himself in 2011.

While the cartoons are clearly jokey in nature, they are chillingly similar to the way former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin brutally executed his rivals.

The cartoon series is titled In Putin’s Reception and shows the Russian president confronting various well-known political figures.

One clip features the former governor of Sakhalin region Alexander Khoroshavin, who was sacked in real life last year for taking bribes.

Khoroshavin is seen grovelling in front of a stern-faced Putin who ignores his pleas and opens a trapdoor under the former governor’s chair.

Another shows business Viktor Grebnev, who faces fraud charges over his company’s work on the Vostochny Cosmodrome.

He begs for mercy, claiming that missing money was only being wasted anyway because “maybe space doesn’t exist”.

An unimpressed Putin ignores his pleas and uses his watch to call a flying saucer to the scene, which immediately kills Grebnev with a laser gun.

In each cartoon, Putin orders deaths that somehow match the victim’s job.

A well-known environment officer is killed with a buzzsaw, while the director of a water company is eaten alive by piranhas and an airline owner run over by an airport bus.

Throughout the clips Putin remains silent and shows little emotion until his political enemy dies.

Putin set up the ONF in 2011 and has used it as a platform to rail against corruption among political and business leaders.

At a Kremlin meeting last week, Putin said that 8,800 people had been convicted of corruption in the first nine months of 2015 alone.

This story first appeared in The Sun.