About 32,000 former prisoners have returned to Russia after fighting in Ukraine

The head of Russia’s private military company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said Sunday that some 32,000 men conscripted from Russian prisons to fight in the conflict in Ukraine have returned home.

He explained that they had fulfilled the terms of the contracts they had signed and deployed in combat.

Human rights groups and many women are concerned that thousands of criminals, including those convicted of first degree murder and other violent crimes, have been granted services and prematurely reintegrated into Russian society.

In some cases, some have already committed new murders.

For the head of Wagner, on the other hand, this is a great program of reintegration into society. Yesterday Prigozhin confirmed via Telegram that those released had only committed 83 crimes. He said that this is less than eighty times the number of felonies committed by criminals who were released after serving their sentences.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, considered a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, personally recruited some of the convicts. Those who signed contracts stating that they would fight in Ukraine would be pardoned by the Kremlin occupiers. The condition was that they served at least six months on the battlefields of Ukraine.

In March, Prigozhin stated that the number of ex-prisoners in Wagner’s ranks was 5,000. After capturing the city of Bakhmut (eastern Ukraine; Russians use its Soviet name Artyomovsk), he said his mercenary company’s losses there amounted to 20,000 men, including 10,000 ex-prisoners.

In many cases, he himself worked to bury ex-convicts with military honors.

Human rights organizations point out that the Russian military is now conducting mass conscription in prisons.