how Putin’s Russia uses its prisoners on the front – L’Express

Like other convicts, Nikolai Ogolobiak benefited from a presidential pardon, retribution for his commitment to the ranks of the army. Other stories sometimes make their way into the media, such as that of Vera Pekhteleva’s mother, killed in 2020 by her ex-partner. Sentenced to 17 years in prison, he was finally pardoned in April 2023 after fighting in Ukraine, which the victim’s family learned two months later. “I don’t understand who can let these people take up arms,” Vera Pekhteleva’s mother confides to the independent media Meduza in June.

Questioned on Wednesday, November 22, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, nevertheless reaffirmed: the Russian government does not intend to change its position in terms of presidential pardons, “linked to a presence on the front line , to a certain duration spent on the front line, linked to participation in assault groups”.

This policy, rumored since the summer of 2022, was officially confirmed by Vladimir Putin in June 2023. In exchange for their enlistment in the army, the State promises detainees to avoid a return to prison, and the surrender of a sum of money. Nothing very new in Russia: since its beginnings in 2014 and until February 2023, the paramilitary organization Wagner had made a habit of going to prisons for its recruitment campaigns.

A method that leaves traces in prisons: according to the independent media Media zonesome 23,000 inmates would have left the country’s prisons between the months of September and October 2022 alone. According to information released by the Washington Post At the end of October, Russia reportedly released nearly 100,000 prisoners since the start of the war in Ukraine. The authorities have also chosen to no longer publish official statistics on the number of detainees.

In this maze of figures, and in a State which has made opacity its watchword, it is impossible to know the journey of these released prisoners, and the number of former prisoners who have returned home. The hypothesis of their death before being pardoned cannot be excluded.

Reacting on Wednesday to Dmitry Peskov’s statement on the continuation of this policy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that “at this stage, the Russian army has made prisoners its main source of compensation for losses on the battlefield” . Despite Vladimir Putin’s investments in the military sector, the “special operation [nom donné à l’invasion de l’Ukraine par la Russie] did not succeed as Vladimir Putin hoped, notes to L’Express General Jérôme Pellistrandi, editor-in-chief of the National defense magazine, it was therefore necessary to compensate for the significant human losses, estimated at nearly 150,000 men.

But the acceptability of the conflict by the Russian population is another challenge for the head of state, who wants to avoid resorting to widespread conscription of the population, and experience a new massive departure of Russians abroad as had been the case. case at the end of 2022.

The recruitment of prisoners is therefore part of a series of strategies put in place by the Kremlin to “place the war effort on a part of the non-protest population”, explains Jérôme Pellistrandi. “The Russian prisoners sent to the front have little to lose,” he continues. In order to recruit from poor regions, Russia has also increased the income level of soldiers, while compensating the families of fighters injured or killed on the front, up to tens of thousands of euros.

But this arrival of convicts on the Ukrainian front can also have an impact on the behavior of the soldiers at the front. “This translates into a form of violence in the behavior of Russian forces,” says General Jérôme Pellistrandi. If, according to him, the return of his pardoned prisoners will not have a significant effect on the acceptance of the war within the population, their incorporation into the army could nevertheless have a longer-term impact on the level of violence in Russian society, with a strong “psychiatric impact on veterans”.