Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that the first prisoners recruited into Russian prisons for 6 months now have clean criminal records
The founder of the private Russian military company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced that the first prisoners recruited from Russian prisons by Wagner to fight in Ukraine on the condition that they sign a six-month contract now have clean criminal records.
“You first served your contract with honor and dignity. You worked as very few people do,” Prigozhin says in a video released by Russia’s state-run RIA-Novosti news agency.
The faces of the former prisoners in the video are retouched.
Answering a journalist’s question about their further plans, they state “we will return to finish what we started”
“This is not work, this is life,” one of Wagner’s fighters is heard saying.
The word “front” in the video is not heard, but judging by the context, one understands that they all intend to continue fighting in Ukraine.
#Prigozhin announced the removal of criminal records from the first group of prisoners from the #Wagner PMC, who were lucky enough to return from #Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/MXDpmbdkQ0
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) January 5, 2023
The timely lifting of convictions for their services at the front was one of the promises Prigozhin made to them when he recruited them.
“Society should treat them with the utmost respect, while they themselves should not break the laws. But if you see a person who came after the war, while before he went he was a prisoner and was classified as a volunteer,… you have to understand that these people are equal members of society” said Prigozhin addressing the prisoners.
He also urged them “not to drink too much, not to take drugs, not to rape women.”
Last November, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law amendments to the conscription law, which lifted a ban on the conscription of citizens convicted or pending conviction of the most serious crimes – although the recruitment of prisoners to send on the Ukrainian front had started much earlier than the signing of the amendments, almost as soon as the ‘partial mobilization’ was announced.
Wagner’s recruitment of prisoners became known in the summer of 2022, while the investigative journalism website Vaznie istrorii had reported that the Ministry of Defense began from the end of September to select prisoners to be sent to the Ukrainian front.
Since the recruitment of prisoners in Russian prisons began, there have been several reports of the death of many of them in Ukraine
One of the prisoners killed, the former leader of an organized crime gang near Moscow, Ivan Nepratov, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Valor by Vladimir Putin.
RES-EMP
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