This is certainly not the first time prisoners have been ‘recruited’ to fight wars, the NAZIs did it in WWII. There was a bit on CNN with the story but I’m sort of busy.
Oskar Dirlewanger German SS commander (1895-1945)
Oskar Paul Dirlewanger was a German military officer and war criminal who served as the founder and commander of the Nazi SS penal unit "Dirlewanger" during World War II.
Putin ‘recruiting prisoners from Russian jails to fight on frontline in Ukraine’ Russian assault slowed by ‘incredibly high’ casualties among troops, West believes Vladimir Putin is recruiting convicts from Russian jails to fill gaps in his fighting force in Ukraine left by “incredibly high” fatalities and injuries, Western officials believe.
It is thought that the Russian president is turning to prisoners and private military companies because of a fear of political opposition in Russia.
VLADIMIR Putin is recruiting lags from Russian jails to fight as his army suffers “incredibly high” fatalities & casualties on the frontline.
Last month, it was reported how Russia has lost nearly a third of its army’s strength since invading Ukraine, according to the UK’s Chief of the Defence Staff.
Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said detailed assessments show President Vladimir Putin’s plan has spectacularly failed.
“They will accept murderers, but not rapists, pedophiles, extremists, or terrorists”, he said. “Amnesty or a pardon in six months is on offer. Somebody talks about 100,000 rubles a month, another 200,000. Everything is different.” He said the offer was made when unidentified men, believed to be part of a private military contractor’s firm, came to the prison in the first half of July, and that acceptance into the program would lead to two weeks of training in the Rostov region in southern Russia. While he had two years’ service in the military, he said the recruiters did not seem to insist on military experience.
Article also said they were being used as “bait” to draw Ukrainian fire so that Russian artillery could pinpoint the target.
All of this may be true. Or could be partially true and partially Ukrainian propaganda.
The article also states: The latest Western assessments suggest up to 75,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured since the invasion began (a claim the Kremlin has denied).
That’s an awful lot of men - especially in the absence of an equivalent estimate from Ukraine - and makes me remember the Vietnamese killed counts which we regularly released by the US military during the Vietnamese war.
Perhaps a bigger story is that while Russia technically can’t use a legal draft, in the “breakaway” republics they are using press gangs to capture men and impress them into the army. These soldiers are given minimal training and used as fodder in the front lines.
Perhaps a bigger story is that while Russia technically can’t use a legal draft, in the “breakaway” republics they are using press gangs to capture men and impress them into the army. These soldiers are given minimal training and used as fodder in the front lines.
Many of the new volunteer troops (yes, these are in fact, volunteers attracted by high salaries) are from the eastern and central Asian portions of the Russian Federation. It’s easier to get Asians to fight against Ukrainian Europeans than it is to get ethnic Russians to fight against a country deemed ethnically close enough to be claimed as “part of Russia”.