Putin has reportedly stopped pardoning prisoner recruits, and Russia’s criminals-in-arms will now serve until the war ends

The Russian military has refined its recruitment of prisoners, distancing Vladimir Putin from the process and preventing inmate soldiers from returning to civilian life before the war’s end. According to a new investigation from BBC Russian journalists Elizaveta Fokht, Ilya Barabanov, and Olga Ivshina, the president no longer issues pardons to convicted criminals in exchange for serving brief tours in Ukraine; prisoners are now recruited to fight as long as the invasion lasts in exchange for probation, not exoneration.

The BBC reviewed messages shared online between the relatives of inmate recruits and spoke to several of these soldiers and their family members. Journalists learned that the Russian military changed its recruitment strategy for prisoners in September 2023, ending what was known as “Storm Z” enlistment and pivoting to “Storm V.”

Some of the military’s use of prisoners is the same: the newer Storm V special companies are still deployed to the most dangerous parts of the front, inmates are still typically sent into battle with far less training, the survival rate is still low (one source told the BBC that it’s an abysmal 25 percent), and killed soldiers’ bodies are often recovered only after long delays, if at all (though these men are now contract soldiers, not volunteers, which means their dog tags are registered with the Defense Ministry and tracking their deaths could become easier).

The change in recruitment policy insulates Putin from headlines about how he pardoned this or that violent offender, and it removes what many draftees perceived (and resented) as the privileged position of prisoner recruits, who previously could return home as free men after just six months in Ukraine. The only ways to get that freedom now before the war ends are (1) winning a special commendation, (2) “loss of health,” or (3) reaching the military’s age limit (which varies by rank). By recruiting inmates as contract soldiers, the Kremlin can lean on the ongoing legal force of Putin’s September 2022 mobilization order, which prohibits the termination of service contracts (for both contract recruits and draftees).

The new recruitment system is based on a law adopted in June 2023 that legalizes sending prisoners into combat on probation terms. The legislation applies to most inmates, including most violent criminals, with rare exceptions for those guilty of offenses related to extremism, terrorism, and most (but not all) forms of child molestation. Neither President Putin nor the courts are needed in this process — prison officials and local military recruiters handle all the formalities — though BBC Russian reporters did find several cases where prisons petitioned judges for “administrative supervision” for inmates after releasing them to the military.

Summary by Kevin Rothrock