By the time Russian Defense Ministry recruiters arrived at penitentiary IK-29 in the far northern region of Arkhangelsk in April, Artyom Bunyatov had already turned down two previous pitches by mercenary group representatives urging him to serve on the front lines in Ukraine in exchange for his freedom.
The 31-year-old convicted drug dealer had been warned by his mother, Larisa, not to make such a pact but instead to serve out the remaining three years of his prison term. He had no previous military training, she reminded him in a phone call.
This time, however, the cajoling finally worked. According to Larisa, the Defense Ministry officials promised him a clean criminal record and a job upon completion of a tour in Ukraine — and he signed up for combat.
The practice of coaxing and pressuring inmates like Bunyatov to serve in Ukraine may soon come to an end — but not because Russia has a surfeit of troops.
With Russian casualties estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, no end to its invasion of Ukraine in sight, and another round of call-ups posing a political risk for the Kremlin ahead of a presidential election in March 2024, Moscow is seeking to make it legal to draft inmates to help fill the ranks.
Russian legislation currently forbids the military to register convicted prisoners for the draft or call them up for duty. But last month, the Defense Ministry submitted a proposal to remove that restriction from the law, potentially making tens of thousands of convicts fair game for deployment to Ukraine.
“It’s possible that they may start conscripting directly from prison,” a representative of Russia Behind Bars, a group that advocates for prisoners’ rights, told RFE/RL.
Read more at
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-drafting-prisoners-law-ukraine-war-attrition/32627429.html
