Since September 2022, representatives of the Ministry of Defense have been recruiting prisoners for the war in 25 Russian regions, the BBC Russian service calculated based on messages on social networks and conversations with the convicts themselves and their relatives.
They started in colonies for former security forces, and since January they began to travel to other places of deprivation of liberty. At the same time, PMC Wagner, which had previously been doing the same, according to its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, stopped recruiting prisoners at the beginning of 2023.
Before the arrival of recruiters, as in the case of Wagner PMCs, communications were cut off in the colonies. In IK-6 of Yoshkar-Ola, where Prigozhin himself came in the summer of 2022, six former convicts who fought on the side of the Wagner PMC came to recruit mercenaries for the Ministry of Defense. In the colonies of Mordovia, a major general, “deputy commander of the troops of one of the military districts”, was engaged in recruiting.
Acquaintances of three prisoners said that they were taken away and did not explain exactly where they were being taken. “One of them (such prisoners — MZ) phoned his wife from Luhansk and said that he was told in the colony “just to go out with things.” The fact that he was going to war, he learned only in the «Stolypin carriage»; on the train,” writes the BBC.
The convicts were allowed to sign petitions for clemency and, according to the documents, were transferred from their colony to IK-12 in the Rostov region near the border with the self-proclaimed LPR to continue serving their sentences. It was also used for prisoners recruited by Wagner PMC. At the same time, according to the Federal Penitentiary Service, after the start of the war, the colony was released for repairs.
The prisoners recruited by the Ministry of Defense, according to the BBC interlocutors, were brought to the training grounds near Donetsk and Lugansk. They were required to first sign contracts with the «people's militia» of the self-proclaimed republics for six months, and soon for another year. Prisoners were sent to the combat zone after “10-14 days of military training.”
Like the Wagner PMC recruiters, representatives of the Ministry of Defense promised after six months of service “a full pardon with the removal of a criminal record from databases,” as well as a salary «150-200 thousand rubles» per month and the restoration of military ranks and benefits for those who were deprived of them by a court decision. According to relatives, in fact they received «no more than 40 thousand rubles a month» on the VTB bank card, which is displayed in the application under the name «Army of Russia».