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full screen Russian prisoners of war returned home, in a picture from last fall. The people in the picture have nothing to do with the text. Archive image. Photo: Russian Ministry of Defense/AP/TT
Russian ex-prisoners with HIV choose to join the war to get medicine, reports The New York Times.
As many as one in five of the Russian former prison inmates recruited and sent to the front in Ukraine are infected with HIV, according to data from Ukraine, which is based on the rate of infection among prisoners of war.
A prisoner tells the newspaper that he was forced to change drugs in prison against his will and that he was afraid he would die within a decade. With promises of medication and a pardon, he signed up for six months in the infamous Wagner group.
– I understood that I would have a quick death or a slow death. I chose a quick death, he says.