“Everyone wants to fight in prison”

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"Sources of replenishment of personnel"

At the beginning of March 2023, Russia transferred a train with prisoners to the annexed territories of the Donetsk region. Among them, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported , there are women. According to the department, the prisoners were transported by train with reserved seats. “Against the background of heavy losses in the war, the enemy is using alternative sources of replenishment of personnel,” the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in a statement.

The first reports that the Russian side was going to send female prisoners to war appeared in early February. Then, according to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, about 50 prisoners from the women's correctional colony in the city of Snizhne (it is located in the occupied territory of the Donetsk region) were sent to Russia to undergo military training.

“I ask for help in atoning for guilt”

From the Russian side, there was no confirmation of these reports. However, in mid-February, Vyacheslav Vegner (United Russia), a member of the Legislative Assembly of the Sverdlovsk Region , wrote that he was receiving appeals from women's colonies, in which prisoners asked him to help send them to the front. As Wegner pointed out, they wrote to him "from almost all corners of the country, starting from the colony-settlement on Sakhalin."

For example, according to Wegner, he received a joint appeal from prisoners from general regime colonies for those who had previously served their sentences - IK-4 in Kurgan and IK-16 in Krasnoturinsk, Sverdlovsk Region. “230 convicted women are ready to work in the war as cooks and nurses, to provide all necessary assistance to the soldiers of the Ministry of Defense and PMC “Wagner” at the front. Taking into account the articles of the convicts, and this is mainly article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (murder. - Approx. "Cold") , the prisoners are ready to work in sabotage groups, killing the enemy in his rear. The female prisoners of PKU IK-4 wish to be rehabilitated in the eyes of society for their crimes, having repaid their debt to the Motherland, the letter said, which the deputy allegedly received. - I ask you to come to the colony and see for yourself the desire of women to fight and help Russia. And I ask you to help in atonement for guilt as part of the Wagner PMC.”

Wegner redirected this appeal to the founder of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin, who personally recruited prisoners in colonies, but he replied that “the project for further recruitment of prisoners is currently closed.” “I and PMC Wagner are completely excluded from this process for the following reasons. The first is overly high task performance. <...> I recommend contacting the Ministry of Defense,” Prigogine allegedly wrote. At the same time, prisoners who were sent to war previously told CNN that it was the Ministry of Defense who recruited them.

As Vyacheslav Wegner told Kholod in March 2023, as a result, none of the women who want to take part in the war, according to his information, has yet been able to do so. Wegner did not write to the Ministry of Defense, as Prigogine advised him.

According to the deputy, in total more than a thousand women prisoners convicted under articles of fraud, theft and murder turned to him. Motivation, the deputy explained, they had different: “Someone - “For the Motherland, for Stalin!”, Someone - “[To freedom -] with a clear conscience!” after the atonement of guilt by participation in the “SVO””. Wegner still supports the very idea of ​​sending convicted women: “Every person should have the right [to choose what to do] if he expresses a desire and this does not contradict the principles of morality. It seems that this is how Pindosia and Geyropa interpret democracy.”

"Anything but a prison"

The founder of the Rus Sedentary movement, Olga Romanova, told Kholod that she learned about the recruitment of female prisoners for the war in Ukraine at the end of 2022. According to her, the women who were brought to the occupied territories of the Donetsk region by train were serving their sentences in the village of Kushchevskaya in the Krasnodar Territory.

“These women worked in the fields, vegetable gardens, there is also agriculture: pigsties, greenhouses. They could be prisoners both from a colony-settlement, and from a zone or a correctional center where women are sentenced to compulsory labor, ”said Romanova. According to her, “they were obviously being prepared for about a month, but no one knows for what.” Most likely, says Romanova, they were convicted, like all [women in Russia], “a third for drugs, all the rest for murder, grievous bodily harm.”

Recently, Romanova learned about another case. Two women in their 50s (one a former prosecutor, the other a former judge) applied to join the war. Both are now in the Moscow SIZO-6 in Pechatniki.

Since the beginning of the war, Romanova had not heard of a single case when prisoners were forced to go to war. The motivation of women, the human rights activist claims, is not the same as Wegner says: “Everyone wants to fight in prison. For the past few years, prison conditions have worsened so much on purpose that people agree to anything, if only not to prison.