Russia prison population plummets as convicts are sent to war
They’ve become a cornerstone for military strategy
RIGA, Latvia — Russia has freed up to 100,000 prison inmates and sent them to fight in Ukraine, according to government statistics and rights advocates, a far greater number than was previously known.
The sharp drop in the number of inmates is evidence that the Defense Ministry continued to aggressively recruit convicted criminals even after blocking access to prisoners by the Wagner mercenary group, which pioneered the campaign to trade clemency for military service.
The Russian prison population, estimated at roughly 420,000 before the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, plummeted to a historic low of about 266,000, according to Deputy Justice Minister Vsevolod Vukolov, who disclosed the figure during a panel discussion earlier this month.
Russian forces are now heavily reliant on prisoners plucked from colonies with the promise of pardons, a practice initiated by the late Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who began recruiting convicts to fight in Ukraine a year ago and amassed a 50,000strong force.
The convicts proved crucial to Wagner’s long, bloody, and ultimately successful campaign to seize the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. In August, three months after claiming control of the city, Prigozhin died in a suspicious airplane explosion.
At the peak of Prigozhin’s recruitment campaign last year, he helicoptered from one Russian penal colony to another urging prisoners to atone for their crimes “with blood” and offering to make them free men. Around that time, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, or FSIN, stopped publishing its typically detailed statistics, shortly after data showed that the male prison population in Russia had declined by 23,000 people in just two months.
“If ten years ago our contingent in prisons reached almost 700,000 people, now we have about 266,000 people in correctional colonies,” Vukolov said early this month, making a rare revelation at a panel on “social reintegration of prisoners in present-day conditions.”
Vukolov's disclosure stunned Russians who monitor the country's prison systems.
“This is a shocking number,” said Olga Romanova, the director of the Russia Behind Bars human rights organization. “There were 420,000 prisoners at the beginning of the war, and we know that Prigozhin took about 50,000.”
She added, "Usually, the influx of newly incarcerated people is roughly similar, so we should be seeing a figure closer to 400,000 now."
"This means that the Defense Ministry has likely recruited around 100,000 people for the war there," Romanova said, calculating the math aloud. "Starting Feb. 1, the Defense Ministry came to all prisons, and if Prigozhin toured colonies one by one, they recruit in them everywhere at once, practically every day."
"There was a feeling that they were exceeding Wagner's rate, but not by much. Now, it turns out that they far exceed it," she added.
Romanova's estimate also included people in pretrial detention centers where her group has documented cases of defendants being recruited to go to war even before their cases reach trial.
The former convicts provided Wagner with a near-constant influx of reinforcements. Prigozhin promised that they would receive presidential pardons after six months of service if they survived the hostilities. Once sent to the front, some were threatened with death if they refused to obey orders. Many were thrown into battle, to near certain death.