VLADIMIR Putin has handed a Brit traitor a Russian passport as a chilling reward for greasing the wheels of the Kremlin’s war machine.
Ben Stimson, 49, from Oldham, is reportedly training ruthless African mercenaries and urging fellow Brits to join Moscow’s illegal war in Ukraine.
Putin crony and Kremlin MP Maria Butina boasted that she had personally secured Stimson’s passport after he faced the “threat of deportation”.
“Ben has already proven his love and loyalty to Russia, his empathy for the residents of the new territories,” she said, referring to invaded areas of Ukraine.
“Yesterday we received a response. A positive decision was made to grant Russian citizenship to the fighter Benjamin Stimson,” she added.
Stimson has previously bemoaned delays to his naturalisation.
“I will not feel 100% safe here until I have Russian citizenship,” he wrote on his Telegram page
“I cannot understand why I as the first British volunteer still has not been granted full citizenship.”
The Brit was blasted last year as a traitor by ex-British Army commander Colonel Richard Kemp after joining Putin’s bloodthirsty ranks.
He and fellow British pro-Russia fighter, Aiden Minnis, 39, were branded “an absolute disgrace and traitors who upon their return to the UK should be arrested and jailed.”
“They clearly don’t know who the enemy is.”
Reports last week said ex-convict and former BNP member Minnis, from Chippenham, Wiltshire, had gone missing and was feared dead.
However, Stimson bragged to his Telegram audience that he had planted the fake story in a bizarre attempt to one-up the British press.
“Aiden is alive and well and always was,” he sneered.
Earlier Stimson had said: “Worried about my comrade Aiden Minnis.
“He’s not been seen for a week. I pray all is OK.”
Minnis himself was earlier granted a Russian passport.
Stimson touched down in Russia in 2015, but was forced back to the UK over passport issues.
On his return, cops swooped in and cuffed him on terrorism charges.
In 2017, he was jailed for five years and four months at Manchester Crown Court.
After his release, he returned to Russia and rejoined the fight, according to Butina.
Stimson’s father Martin reportedly disowned him in 2024 for fighting for Russia.
Butina, 37, was previously jailed in the US on the espionage charge of “conspiring to work for a foreign government”.
Now a prominent MP for United Russia, she was arrested in the United States in July 2018 and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
She pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to act as a foreign agent.
Butina was convicted of seeking to infiltrate conservative groups in the US including the National Rifle Association.
She was deported to Russia in October 2019 after her sentence was slightly reduced for good behaviour.
