Prigozhin asserts that the recruitment of prisoners for the war has been stopped

The creator and sponsor of PMC Wagner, businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin claims that a private military company has stopped the recruitment of prisoners in Russian colonies to participate in the war in Ukraine. Prigozhin’s statement was published by his press service on Thursday morning.

The statement was made in response to a request by Live24 journalists. According to them, a large number of prisoners are contacting the editorial office who write that for more than a month there has been no recruiting from correctional facilities established at the “Wagner” PMC.

“Yes, indeed, that’s right,” replied Prigozhin, “the recruitment of prisoners in the PMC “Wagner” has been completely stopped. Before the topic of who works for us now, all obligations are fulfilled,” he added. Prigozhin did not give the reason why the PMC stopped recruiting prisoners.

From the spring of 2022, information began to appear in the mass media that Wagner’s PMC was recruiting prisoners in Russian colonies to participate in the war with Ukraine in exchange for a pardon.

How many people were recruited for the war from Russian colonies is not reliably known. FSIN announced a reduction in the number of prisoners last year by almost 30,000 people.

The head of the “Sitting Rus'” foundation, Olga Romanova, said in January that the Wagner PMC could attract up to 50,000 prisoners. Romanova claimed that about 10,000 people remained at the front, and the rest died, were wounded, went missing, deserted or were captured.

“Mediazona” reported that at the end of 2022, employees of “PMC Wagner” began for the second time to go around the colonies in which prisoners had already been recruited, but this time there were several times less people willing to go to war. The recruitment itself was conducted in a less solemn atmosphere, and Prigozhin no longer flew there by helicopter.

As lawyer Yana Helmel and former member of the Perm Regional Public Monitoring Commission (ONK) Oksana Asaulenko told “Agency”, recently prisoners in Russian colonies have been threatened with new criminal cases for refusing to go to war in Ukraine in the ranks of the Wagner PMC.

At the beginning of February, Romanova reported that in Russian colonies they continue to recruit prisoners to participate in the war, but the people who conducted the recruitment said that they represented the Ministry of Defense of Russia, and not “Wagner’s PMC”.

• “PMC Wagner” is an unofficial Russian military unit that does not belong to the Ministry of Defense of Russia or other state structures. Fighters of PMC Wagner participate in ground operations in Syria, Africa and in the war with Ukraine. Mercenaries are suspected of committing numerous war crimes.
• As a rule, in the reports of the Ministry of Defense, the PMC appears as detachments of some volunteers. It is known that “Wagner’s PMC” plays an important, and according to Prigozhin – the main role in the storming of the city of Bakhmut, where some of the fiercest battles since the beginning of the war have been going on.