Russia has announced it is planning to release prisoners on the condition they sign up to fight against Ukraine, in an effort to boost recruitment in the Russian military.
According to news agencies, Russia’s Supreme Court is currently drafting a law “that allows for the exemption of criminal liability” for any defendant willing to enter “into a military contract”.
While Russian officials have assured that this only applies to non-violent offenders, there have been dozens of cases of murderers and rapists being released.
For example, one of the murderers of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov Temirlan Eskerkhanov was reportedly released just last week to join the fight in Ukraine.
“He was assigned to an assault unit and is now carrying out combat missions,” a government source told the TASS news agency.
Experts have pointed to the difficulty in recruiting for the Russian military leading to offers such as this new law.
“The Russian state has been finding it harder to sustain the call-up rates that it needs for the war,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told The Telegraph. “That’s why he scraped out the prisons.”
Russian private military company the Wagner mercenary group initially recruited from Russian prisons in 2022, a measure then implemented by Russia’s ministry of defence a year later.
Prisoners could trade their sentence by serving in the military for six months, while no official numbers are available, data from Russian prisons show that there was the prison population dropped by 58,000 men in 2023 alone.
