More than 5,000 Russian prisoners were pardoned by the courts after having fought as mercenaries in Ukraine, Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner group, admitted on Saturday.
The prisoners were pardoned once their six-month contracts expired, Yevgeny Prigozhin said in a message posted on Telegram.
The official indicated that only 0.31% of those who were released after completing their contract committed crimes upon returning to Russia.
“I can confidently say that we have reduced crime rates in Russia tenfold,” he stressed.
Justifying recruitment into Russian prisons, Prigozhin responded to critics that it is better for mercenaries or convicts to fight in Ukraine, “than their sons.”
In early February, Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that his military company had stopped recruiting convicts who, according to other sources, were pardoned by the Kremlin before reaching the front.
The Wagner group is said to have recruited some 50,000 Russian prisoners since the start of the war in Ukraine, according to prisoners’ rights organization Rus Siadiaschi.
According to activist Olga Románova, at the beginning of the year only about 10,000 former prisoners remained in Ukraine, as the rest died, disappeared, deserted or were arrested.
Recently, United Nations (UN) experts warned that the recruitment of prisoners, which would also be carried out in prisons located in the territories occupied by Russian troops in Ukraine, could constitute a war crime.
UN experts ensured that these prison recruits suffered frequent threats and mistreatment by their superiors, some of them publicly as a warning to their colleagues, while others who tried to desert were executed.
The Ukrainian General Staff denounced, in the middle of this month, that Russia sent a convoy full of common prisoners to the territories it controls in the Donetsk region to compensate for the numerous casualties suffered in the assault on the “Bajmut fortress”.
Source: TSF
