Typically, men who beat their elderly mothers to death in a drunken rage do not become state heroes. Yet this is exactly what occurred when convicted murderer Sergei Molodtsov was buried with full military honours this month after giving his life for Russia in its war against Ukraine.
Last September, video footage showed Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s confidante and head of the Wagner mercenary group, touring Russian prisons to recruit inmates for the war effort and offer them a pardon in return for six months of frontline duty in Ukraine.
According to Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, 38,244 Russian convicts have now accepted Prigozhin’s offer, tempted by the lure of freedom, 200,000 roubles payment (£2,383) and compensation of 700,000 roubles (£8,342) to their relatives should they be killed in action.
The historical parallels are striking, the Soviet Union having released nearly a million prisoners from Gulag camps to fill the battle lines of the Second World War. Now, with Russia’s military losses in Ukraine reaching into the many tens of thousands, its government has been forced to look to the country’s 400,000 prison inmates to either labour in factories, and so rapidly replenish Russia’s decimated military stocks, or become frontline soldiers, and so rapidly replenish Russia’s equally decimated army.
As their deaths are less likely to fuel domestic unrest than losses from the rest of the population, convict soldiers have found themselves used as ‘cannon fodder‘. Deployed at the very front of the front line, ahead of conscripts and career soldiers, prisoners have reported being sent on the most perilous reconnaissance missions to locate Ukrainian positions and into repeated, head-on assaults entailing heavy losses, but leading to the territorial gains which enabled Wagner forces to attack the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
Unsurprisingly, there is a high attrition rate. Podolyak claims that 29,543 convict soldiers — around 77% of the total — have been killed, captured or injured. According to prisoner rights activist Olga Romanova, just two of the first 500 convicts who headed to the front line in June made it back.
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