By KYIV. May 11 (Interfax-Ukraine) – The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation has expanded the scheme for recruiting Russian convicts to participate in hostilities in Ukraine from the beginning of 2023.
According to a defense intelligence report published on Twitter by the Ministry of Defense of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on Thursday morning, in April 2023 alone, the ranks of the Russian military were supposedly filled with up to 10,000 convicts.
“From summer 2022, prisoners were the key pool of recruits for the Wagner Group private military company’s operations in Ukraine. However, the group highly likely lost access to the Russian penal system in February 2023 when its public feud with the MoD was escalating,” British intelligence reported.
“The MoD’s prisoner recruitment campaign is part of a broader, intense effort by the Russian military to bolster its numbers, while attempting to avoid implementing new mandatory mobilisation, which would be very unpopular with the Russian public,” the report notes.
