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Telegraph - Russia’s riot police show their fluffy side

Omon machismo dominated the show. One group displayed their strength by chopping flaming bricks in two with their bare hands. Another hardy individual performed stomach crunches on a bed of broken glass as his colleague dropped knives on to his washboard stomach.

Techno music filled the air as officers formed a circle, picked a partner and then demonstrated dozens of different ways to disarm, disable and then finish him off with a gunshot to the back, an exercise that was accompanied by theatrical grunts.

With lengthy demonstrations of Kalashnikov firing, grenade tossing and Chechen killing, the sensitive bit of the exercise seemed in danger of being drowned out.

Clockwise from top left: Demonstrating the Klashnikov’s firepower; An officer does crunches on broken glass as a colleague drops a knife on his stomach; preparing for a baton charge; reinforcements arrive

But then Ajax the attack alsatian appeared and Omon’s cuddly side suddenly shone forth.

An officer placed a cat on the ground just yards away from the panting dog.

If Ajax’s soul was tormented by this feline temptation, it did not show. After all, this was a dog on whose shoulders lay the responsibility of reshaping Omon’s battered reputation.

To the orders of his handler, Ajax proceeded to lick and nuzzle the cat, whose expression of nonchalance only started to slip when the dog lifted it into the air in its jaws, carried it several feet and then gently placed it back on the ground.

“You see,” said Maj Gen Alexander Ivanin, commenting through a microphone, “our service dogs wouldn’t threaten a thing.”

Ajax the attack alsatian offers a gentle lift to a cat at the Omon security service demonstration

Hilarious.

(See, in my head, I imagine the guy plucked out of the hordes in the first pics whose job it was to train the dog to do that. There’s a lot of possibilities there, in my head.)