To compensate for huge losses, the Russian government is said to have sent female inmates to the front lines in Ukraine for the first time.
The Ukrainian army claims that President Vladimir Putin sought “other sources of replenishing of manpower” due to “severe casualties” in the fight.
It added: ‘Last week there was a movement towards the Donetsk region of a train with reserved seats for transporting prisoners. One of the carriages [was for] convicted women.’
There were claims earlier this week that Russia had relocated female criminals to Kuschevka in the Krasnodar region, close to the combat zone.
According to Olga Romanova of the Russian Behind Bars charity, over 100 women were deported to Ukraine.
In recent months, tens of thousands of male prisoners have been recruited in Russia and promised a bargain in which their sentences will be commuted if they serve and survive for six months on the frontlines.
Murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals have been released and eventually freed by Putin, with the majority of inmates serving in Wagner’s private army.
However, Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin stated last month that his organization will no longer recruit inmates to fight in Ukraine, without explaining why.
But, there is now proof that the Russian defense ministry is signing up inmates directly.
The Ukrainian general staff stated last month that Russia was aggressively attempting to recruit convicted women to participate in hostilities. This was to ‘compensate for manpower losses’.
Several came from a women’s correctional colony in Snezhnoye, a city in the seized Donetsk region.
‘It is also known that they are sent to Russian Federation territory for training,’ claimed the Ukrainian general staff.
Several hundred women in prisons in the Sverdlovsk region in the Ural District – asked local MP Vyacheslav Wegner to send them to Ukraine, it was reported.
Prigozhin, head of Wagner, said there had been ‘resistance’ among the Russian authorities to deploy women in the war zone.