PMC “Redut” massively recruits Russian prisoners after the departure of “Wagner”. More than a thousand convicts have already been sent to the front

In 2023, several detachments of the PMC “Redut” immediately began to recruit prisoners from Russian colonies, the investigative project of Radio Liberty and the channel Nastoyachesche vremya “Sistema” found out. With the help of open data and from communication with relatives of prisoners, journalists managed to establish the names of more than 30 convicts who serve in the “Redout”. The Foundation “Sitting Russia” believes that the total number of prisoners in the “Redout” may exceed a thousand people. They are recruited in correctional institutions throughout Russia: from Belgorod to Vladivostok. And one of the recruiters of the “Redout” spoke to the correspondent “Systems” that recruit prisoners from colonies “collectively and systematically”.

What is “Redut” PMC and how it is connected with Russian military intelligence, see in the joint video “Schemes” and “Systems” – Ukrainian and Russian-language investigative projects of Radio Liberty:

In February 2023, the head of PMC “Wagner” Yevgeny Prigozhin announced the termination of the recruitment of prisoners to the company – thus, the Russian Ministry of Defense became a monopoly on attracting people from the colonies to the war in Ukraine. Previously, starting from mid-autumn 2022, the military recruited convicted ex-employees of law enforcement agencies in the so-called red colonies (IC for former employees of law enforcement agencies). From 2023, recruiters of the military department began to come to other correctional institutions as well. Some of the prisoners agree to go to war, because Vladimir Putin promised to pardon the participants in the hostilities.

Already in the summer, messages about people who, being in correctional colonies, entered into an agreement with the Ministry of Defense, but left for the war as part of one of the detachments of the PMC Redut, began to appear in chat rooms where relatives of prisoners communicate. open data and conversations with relatives of convicts, were able to learn the names of 32 such prisoners.

The recruitment process begins with the fact that representatives of the Ministry of Defense come to the colony and offer the convicts to conclude an agreement on “participation in the performance of special tasks” for a period of up to one and a half years. Prisoners are promised amnesty after six months of service, but according to the agreement, after that they will have to sign an annual contract with the Ministry of Defense.

The recruitment of convicts is carried out “accurately and systematically”, according to the words of one of the recruiters of “Reduta”, with whom the journalist of “Sistema” spoke. Already after the convicts get to the training camp or to the front line, the commanders of the Redoubt take away (in military slang – “buy out”) some part of the new recruits, explains the founder of the “Sitting Russia” aid fund for convicts in a conversation with “Sistema” Olga Romanova.

Before the ban “from above”, PMC “Wagner” clung to a monopoly on the recruitment of prisoners, since the Wagnerians received an additional budget for this, Romanova believes. But for Reduta, the recruitment of convicts may turn out to be an additional burden rather than a benefit, the human rights activist believes: “Unlike the Prigozhyns, they [редутовцы] they don’t know the prison hierarchy, they don’t know how to behave and how to communicate with prisoners.” Also, unlike Wagner, now the representatives of Redut have a more “bottle neck” – if the Wagnerians had the opportunity to recruit from the zones directly, then now only people from the Ministry of Defense have access to the colony.

“Many prisoners complain that they were recruited by the Ministry of Defense, but now they actually serve in the “company” [“Редут”]. And they don’t like it, they are more willing to trust the state than such “shopkeepers”. Prigozhin was an understandable figure for them, and “Redout” – что это? This is how they reason,” says the founder of “Sitting Russia”.

In some cases, prisoners who signed an agreement with the military department have to re-sign the contract already with Redoubt, said two relatives of such fighters in a conversation with Sistema. From the moment of “purchase”, responsibility for the mercenaries is already borne by the commanders of the “company”, says the wife of one of the soldiers: “He takes under his care [их] “Redoubt”.

As a rule, the prisoners are in a separate company in one of the five Redoubt detachments: “Veterans”, “Lynx”, “Tiger”, “Wolves” or “North”. They come to “Redut” from the most different Russian colonies, “Sistema” found out: we found people from Mordovia, Tula, Yekaterinburg, Vladivostok, Belgorod, Perm Region, Bashkiria, Sverdlovsk and Saratov regions.

A significant number of convicts train at one of the training grounds of the “Reduta” battalion of “Wolves”: the instructor of the battalion claimed in an interview with RT that the majority of recruits at the training ground are former prisoners. At the end of August 2023, the ex-commander of “Volkov” Davor Savychich complained on the air of the propaganda talk show “Solovyev LIVE” that “prisoners began to leave” this battalion.

It is difficult to calculate the exact number of prisoners recruited into the Redoubt: neither the Ministry of Defense nor the “company” itself advertises these data. By the time of publication, the Ministry of Defense managed to take more than 30 thousand convicts to the war, Romanova emphasizes, and more than a thousand people could have gone to Redoubt.

The “Sitting Russia” Foundation knows about 600 prisoners who were recruited by the Ministry of Defense in February 2023, served the six months prescribed for the amnesty, but still have not received a pardon.

As found out in the joint investigation of “Sistema” and “Scheme”, “Redout” is a pseudo-PMC with a branched system of combat formations, which is directly managed by the Ministry of Defense and the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU). Read more about this in the large article about “Redut PMC”.

The authors of the investigation asked for comments to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, but at the time of publication of the material they did not receive answers to their questions. The press secretary of the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, read the editor’s questions in a telegram and also did not answer them. Curator of the “Redut” system, deputy head of the GRU, Vladimir Alekseev, marked a message in the chat with a heart emoji – and that’s all.

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