The convicts sustaining Putin’s invasion
Russian inmates enlisting in numbers not seen since World War II
Alexander Mokin had lost the will to live.
Convicted of selling drugs and ostracized by his family, he endured abuse from guards and frequent spells in solitary confinement at a high-security Russian prison. He told a friend he felt alone and wracked with guilt.
Then, in the summer of 2022, Mokin and other inmates in the Chelyabinsk region’s Penal Colony No. 6, known at IK6, started hearing rumors. One of Russia’s most powerful men was reportedly touring jails and offering pardons for prisoners who survived six months of fighting in Ukraine.
And by October 2022, there he was, Yevgeny Prigozhin, standing before them in his fatigues, himself an ex-con who now ran a private military company, Wagner. He offered freedom and money, even as he warned the price for many would be death. Mokin and 196 other inmates enlisted the same day.
“I really wish to be there, knowing that this is likely to be a journey without return,” Mokin, then 35 and serving an 11-year sentence, told a friend in a text message that was viewed by The New York Times.
Two months later, Mokin was dead.
As the war in Ukraine grinds to a stalemate, Mokin’s ultimate legacy may be his small role in a much bigger, globally significant enterprise: He was one of tens of thousands of convicts powering the Kremlin’s war machine. Even now, with Prigozhin dead and Wagner disbanded, Russian inmates are still enlisting in what has become the largest military prison recruitment program since World War II.
In Ukraine, those former inmates have been used mostly as cannon fodder. But they have bolstered the ranks of Russia’s forces, helping President Vladimir Putin postpone a new round of mobilization, which would be an unpopular measure domestically. And since many of the inmates come from poor families in rural areas, it has helped Putin to maintain the veneer of normalcy among well-off Russians in major cities.
Some of the inmates’ reasons for choosing the war were obvious. Many said they were driven by patriotism, a desire to escape prison or a craving for action after years of confinement. Yet interviews with the fighters and their relatives also revealed a deeper longing for redemption, a powerful emotional force in a country that has long wrestled with the meaning of guilt and sacrifice. For men stuck in the savage, dehumanizing conditions of Russian prisons, the war offered a chance to regain their sense of self-worth, even if it meant potentially taking other lives.
The Times obtained the names and details of the 197 initial IK6 recruits and was able to confirm the fates of 172 of them through 2023. Times reporters interviewed 16 of them, spoke with the families and friends of others, and reviewed social media, court records and a database of war casualties compiled by an independent news outlet, Mediazona.
What emerges is the most comprehensive portrait yet of the convicts who played an outsize role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The harshest finding was the one Prigozhin warned of: death. At least 1 in 4 recruits who left jail with Mokin in October 2022 has been killed. The data shows the recruits averaged 33 years old and came mostly from small towns and villages. Their most common crime was selling drugs. They had, on average, five more years left on their sentences.
Some men, however, signed up with as little as three months left behind bars, suggesting other motivations than freedom.
Nikolai, a construction worker who was convicted along with his wife for selling drugs, said he joined Wagner out of patriotism. Money also helped. Even if he died, he said, the compensation Wagner promised his family — about $50,000 — would solve their housing problems. “This is wonderful, I thought.”
Even death would have meaning if he were killed in battle.
“I didn’t want to be such a bad person in the eyes of the children in our village,” he said. “I would be remembered not as a convict, but as a man who died in a war.”