Prisoners beaten, threatened with new sentences to force them to fight Russia’s war against Ukraine

From offering freedom, presidential pardons and substantial pay for agreeing to fight against Ukraine, Russia has turned to more standard methods of violence and terror to force convicted prisoners to fight its war against Ukraine. Russians serving sentences in prison colonies are beaten up and terrorized, while foreign nationals are also threatened with new prosecutions and longer sentences on ‘extremism’ charges if they don’t sign contracts, officially to join the army, in practice to fight against Ukraine.

Radio Liberty’s Siberian Realities project has learned of such methods from prisoners in three Russian prison colonies or their families, with the title of the  resulting material reflecting the interviewees’ awareness that Russia is resorting to such methods to get “meat” or cannon fodder for its war. According to the prisoners, the numbers in their prison colonies have halved since the autumn of 2024 with the number of new prisoners brought there 10 times less. 

The reduction in new prisoners is solely because of a law signed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin in October 2024, introducing another method of ‘recruitment’. This made it possible for those under criminal investigation, on trial or already convicted to get the charges dropped or sentence suspended if they signed a contract  to fight in Russia’s army “for the periods of mobilization, martial law and in wartime”.  Although any such arrangement was supposed to be voluntary, the conditions in Russian SIZO [remand prisons] and the possibility of radically increasing charges should a person not ‘cooperate’ has clearly made this a very effective method of coercion.  The law also provided a way of muffling the huge increase in gruesome murders and other shocking crimes committed by the convicted criminals earlier pardoned, once they were back in Russia, since they too could be returned to the front. 

Moscow’s determination to seize more and more Ukrainian territory, and its total disregard for the number of its own soldiers it kills in the process have meant that they require new sources or new methods for obtaining ever more  “meat” for their army.  When Yevgeny Prigozhin first began cooperating with the Russian prison service to recruit  convicted criminals for his ‘Wagner unit’ in the summer of 2022, he was quite open in pointing out that the Russian public should prefer this to their own sons being sent to the front.  It was also clear that prisoners who had committed violent crimes were more, rather than less, in demand when they were being sent to kill Ukrainians. The more serious criminals were probably also easier to entice with the promise of a presidential pardon, release and substantial amounts of money as they were serving very long sentences. 

Siberian Realities does not name the three prison colonies, to prevent the men they spoke with facing reprisals, but they were from three different regions, and it seems likely that the situation is similar in other colonies.  The sentences were probably shorter and, in any case, many of the prisoners will have preferred to remain in prison rather than face the very real risk of being killed.

Both prisoners and their relatives have reported mass beatings, with the telephones the men often have (probably by bribing prison staff) taken away, so that the men cannot tell people what’s happening and with such illegal possession of telephones presumably also used as leverage.  One of the contacts said that they “drag everyone, indiscriminately, to the warfront”. “The prisoners shop each other. You die today, and I will tomorrow.”

Just as with the torture Russia’s FSB standardly use to extract ‘confessions’, here too there will be a limit for most prisoners of how much violence, torture, etc. they can endure before they cave in and sign the contract foisted on them. Natalia’s son  had long managed to hold out, but she explains that he too finally gave in. She had lost any telephone contact with him, due to the above methods, and he was only able to call once, after he had been taken to the warfront. He told her that they would have killed him one way or another – in the prison colony if he continued to hold out, or at the front.  Her son was “no moron”, Natalia says, but they had clearly terrified him, until he surrendered to that “animal-like fear”.  When he phoned, he did not even know where the military unit that he had been added to was deployed.  She has heard nothing from him since.

A person whose friend is in a medium-security prison in the Volga region told her that in all the years of his sentence he hadn’t expressed anything so terrible as what was now happening. She explains that some of the prisoners agreed to sign contracts for the money, or because they couldn’t cope with the isolation when the telephones were removed.  Not one, she said, had any ideological motive.  There were, however, many who still refused to agree to fight, and from the beginning of the year literally all of the prisoners faced horrific beatings.  On one occasion, around 100 OMON [riot police] men turned up and beat up each prisoner. You had only to try to raise your hand and they’d claim you were showing ‘resistance’.  A lot of men were sent to the front, she says, with the breakages and other injuries from the battering they received.  Others were taken “to Moscow”, with direct threats along the way convincing men like her friend that their lives were in danger.

The situation was very similar in a Tula oblast prison colony, where the men were beaten by around 100 thugs from the prison service, OMON and FSB.  The friend of a person serving a drugs-related sentence said that 15 foreign nationals had been taken away, with those who hadn’t already signed the contract to fight, being told that they would be taken to the FSB’s Lefortovo prison in Moscow and would have new ‘extremism’ charges laid.

In June 2024, Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service reported that 48 thousand prisoners had been ‘recruited’ from Russian prison colonies and SIZO to kill Ukrainians.  Of these 17 thousand were estimated to have died in Russia’s battle to seize Bakhmut. 

After Prigozhin’s fall from Putin’s favour, and the supposed ‘accident’ in which he and the main Wagner commander Dmitry Utkin were killed, Russia’s defence ministry took over ‘recruiting’ prisoners.  The conditions changed with convicted prisoners no longer sent for limited periods, with those who survived, returning with lots of money and a presidential pardon meaning not only freedom but that their convictions had been quashed.

Even now that the situation has officially changed, prisoners released to kill Ukrainians from huge sentences for grave crimes can still end up back in Russia if wounded, or if deemed to have served the aggressor state well.  Of those who returned, a large number have committed murders and other violent offences.  Since October 2024, even that is not a problem.  Ivan Rassomakhin, for example,  raped and murdered an 85-year-old woman after being pardoned by Putin and recruited to fight at the front.  He returned to kill more kill more Ukrainians after serving only 5 days of his sentence.

While the regime may try to say as little as possible about Rassomakhin and others who commit gruesome new crimes, they are treating all such ‘war veterans’ as ‘heroes’, with many sent into schools to teach children about ‘courage’ and ‘patriotism’.   Russia’s new pantheon of dead ‘heroes’ includes mercenaries, like Arsen Pavlov ]’Motorola]] who publicly admitted to war crimes and convicted criminals like Ivan Neparatov, leader of a criminal gang who was serving 25 years for five murders and multiple other crimes when recruited to kill Ukrainians. He was posthumously awarded for ‘courage’ by Putin who had presumably earlier signed his pardon despite extremely grave crimes.