Orlov Stanislav

Commander of the reconnaissance company of the 3rd brigade of the DPR. Member of the Union of Donbass Volunteers, one of the leaders of the Russian CSKA fan movement, the creator of the Española battalion in 2022 from football hooligans. Also known as "The Spaniard".

Born in 1981 in Moscow. There is no publicly available information about the education and places of work of the Spaniard, while it is known that in the mid-2000s he may have worked at the National Hotel in Moscow (position and functions are unknown), and also that, according to his own statements, he supposedly “has several higher educations, and he knows five foreign languages, including Spanish” (in connection with which later, in 2014, the “anti-fascist fighter”, who arrived in the Donbass occupied by pro-Russian formations from Spain, allegedly "took him as the best friend", and for this reason Orlov received the pseudonym "Spaniard ").

In 1999, he took part in the "Second Chechen War" in the ranks of the 106th Airborne Division.

Stanislav Orlov has been participating in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since 2014 (he motivated his decision by “protecting relatives” in the city of Snezhnoye, Donetsk region” , as well as “by the desire to understand what is happening after the shelling of the city of Gorlovka by the Armed Forces of Ukraine”, as a result of which another of his relatives allegedly died).

Initially, he was an assistant to the field commander of the so-called "DPR" Igor Bezler, and in 2015, "when Bezler was taken out of the region", Orlov headed the reconnaissance company "Skull and Bones" (the city of Gorlovka). In his own words, "after the end of the hot phase of the fighting at the end of 2015, he left the Donbass". Then he joined the "Union of Volunteers of Donbass" (UDV). This organization was created by the then assistant to the President of the Russian Federation Vladislav Surkov. It included “veterans” of the Russian war against Ukraine under the leadership of Alexander Khodakovsky, the commander of the “Vostok” formation. The SDD was considered as an alternative to the National Guard and was supposed to become Surkov's personal PMC. At the end of September 2016, Orlov was spotted in Montenegro with other mercenaries. It is believed that he went on a “business trip” on the instructions of Khodakovsky. A few days later, an assassination attempt on that country's prime minister, Milo Djukanovic, and a coup d'état were thwarted.

It is noteworthy that during the hostilities, the “Spaniard” decided to use his fan background (from his youth he was fond of near-football fanaticism and since 1995 was a member of “Red Blue Warriors", one of the oldest and most famous groups of CSKA fans ) to recruit militants for their "activities" in the Donbass, and in the spring of 2022, shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine, created an illegal armed formation "Española" from Russian football fans. Currently, as stated, in this "detachment" there are fans of Moscow CSKA, Spartak, Lokomotiv, Torpedo, St. Petersburg Zenit, Yekaterinburg Ural, Yaroslavl Shinnik, Orel, Rostov, Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnodar Kuban, Ramensky Saturn, as well as clubs from the occupied Ukrainian territories: Donetsk Shakhtar, Simferopol Tavriya, Mariupol Ilyichevets. In addition, the group also includes an “Orthodox priest”, also a former football hooligan “Father Lavrenty”.

Initially, Española was formed under the auspices of the so-called “Vostok” brigade by Alexander Khodakovsky (currently the so-called “114th separate guards motorized rifle Enakievo-Danube brigade of the Russian Armed Forces”), but in February 2023, according to published data, this "detachment" was reformatted into a "private military company" and, as of the spring of this year, is completing its contract with Vostok. The Spaniard himself says he plans to "raise a regiment" of fans and their friends and relatives.

According to available information, "Española" positions itself as a reconnaissance unit, it consists of scouts, snipers, combat medics, signalmen, attack aircraft, UAV operators and electronic warfare crews. The size of the unit Orlov does not disclose, while noting that we are talking about a “three-digit number” (at the same time, the number of personnel in the city of Donetsk as of February 2023, according to Orlov, is 150 people ). Española is divided into three “compartments”: 1) veterans with combat experience, mainly from the Skull and Bones reconnaissance company, 2) fighters without experience, a reserve that is being trained, 3) a humanitarian wing that provides for Española and carries out fundraising (this wing is headed by a certain Ilya Khanin ). Orlov claims that his unit is financed by people from the fan movement, as well as some football clubs, such as Shinnik and Khimki. It is reported that the main headquarters of Española is located in Moscow, where candidates are interviewed (after being recruited via Telegram). After the selection of recruits, they are trained at training grounds in the Moscow region and near St. Petersburg. They are explained and shown the basic principles of the work of reconnaissance detachments, taught tactical medicine and fire training (Glock and Cz pistols, as well as Kalashnikov assault rifles). Those who have completed basic training are sent to the main training ground in the occupied territory of Ukraine - in the rear. It is called the pioneer camp "Zvyozdochka". The fighters are then assigned to combat squads.

It is known about the participation of "Española" in the hostilities in various locations - in particular, in Mariupol and in the Vugledar direction.

A distinctive feature of the Spaniard’s environment (despite his statements about “several higher educations and speaking several foreign languages”) can be considered an extremely weak intellectual and educational level (for example, Igor Bezler, whose assistant Orlov was in 2014-15, built a public argument for his political positions on fake “Bismarck quotes” “about Russians and Ukrainians”, which have long been disavowed as fiction and turned into an anecdotal Internet meme), as well as a pronounced “Stockcolm syndrome”. An example of the latter is the absolutely perverted logic of Orlov, who positions himself as a “near-football fan” and at the same time, in fact, speaks “masochistically approvingly” about the Kremlin’s repression of Russian fans, including in the context of the infamous “Fan - ID” policy: “After the introduction of Fan-ID, the guys had nowhere to go, but we accepted it, you know, as in the song: “We must accept it with gratitude”, and they stopped going to football, and after that we witnessed a large number of people who wanted to come here to make their contribution [to the war against Ukraine] " . The fact that the “Spaniard” has a “rather strange relationship” with the logic as a whole can also be seen from his statement that “the real Ukraine is the DPR and LPR, and the criminal regime operates on the rest of the territory ” (despite the fact that Ukrainian statehood and identity are denied by the Russian authorities even at the level of Putin, and the so-called "LPR" and "DPR" never positioned themselves as "Ukraine", in September 2022 "became part of" Russia).

For this reason, it is not surprising that almost any interview with a fighter of his unit is, as a rule, a set of loud, rather ridiculous and unsupported absurd conspiracy clichés, where there is not a hint of an attempt to understand the cause-and-effect relationships of ongoing events or at least verify information. For example, here is a quote from one of his fighters:

“First of all, I am fighting here for the future of our children and my country. We understand very well that if we fail here, Russia will not exist. Many opponents, in addition to the chevron with the Ukrainian flag, wear the US flag on their sleeves. It turns out that they want everyone here to live according to American laws, and the Americans are their masters. But Donbass is Russian land, the land of our ancestors. If we fail to defend it, then we are unworthy of their memory .”

It is important to note that the Española group is actively present in the media space: in particular, Russian propagandist Sladkov reported on the first person killed in this detachment in the fall of 2022 , and Readovka, Ridus, Expert and other pro-Kremlin media also made detailed reports about the Spaniard and his formation.

Direct and long-term participation in the aggressive aggressive war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
The facts of the participation of Orlov and his “comrades-in-arms” in the criminal war unleashed by the Kremlin, which aims to destroy Ukraine as a state, are confirmed by a large amount of factual material, which gives every reason for the appropriate prosecution of this person and other members of the group.

It should be noted that, in addition to direct participation in hostilities, Orlov tries to maintain a certain level of media coverage of his "activities". His goal in this case is to spread the propaganda of the “war against Ukraine and the West” to the target groups of Russian society he has chosen (in particular, to football fans and their relatives) in order to recruit as many militants as possible and get as many "help" from sympathizers. For this reason, Stanislav "Spaniard" Orlov can be additionally referred to as one of the military propagandists.