Russia apparently struggling to replenish its troops in Ukraine

The inmates of the St. Petersburg penal colony were waiting for the visit of officials, thinking that it would be some kind of inspection. Instead, uniformed men arrived and offered them amnesty, if they would agree to fight alongside the Russian army in the Ukraine.

Over the next few days, about a dozen left the prison, according to a woman whose boyfriend is serving time there. Speaking on condition of anonymity because she feared reprisals, she said her boyfriend was not among the volunteers, though with years on her sentence, she “couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

As Russia continues to suffer losses in its invasion of Ukraine, now approaching its sixth month, the Kremlin has refused to announce a full-fledged mobilization, a move that could be highly unpopular with President Vladimir Putin. Instead, that has led to a covert recruiting effort that includes the use of prisoners to make up for labor shortages.

This is also happening amid reports that hundreds of Russian soldiers are refusing to fight and trying to leave the army.

“We are seeing a huge flow of people who want to leave the war zone, those who have been serving for a long time and those who recently signed a contract,” said Alexei Tabalov, a lawyer who heads the legal department at the Conscript School. support group

The group has seen an influx of applications from men who want to terminate their contracts, “and I personally get the impression that everyone who can is ready to run,” Tabalov said in an interview with The Associated Press. “And the Ministry of Defense is digging deep to find those it can persuade to serve.”

Although the Ministry of Defense denies that “mobilization activities” are taking place, the authorities appear to be doing everything possible to encourage the enlistment. Billboards and public transport advertisements in several regions proclaim, “This is the job,” urging men to join the professional army Authorities have set up mobile recruitment centers in some cities, including one at the site of a stocking marathon in Siberia in May.

The autonomous administrations are forming “volunteer battalions” that are promoted on state television. The Kommersant business daily counted at least 40 such entities in 20 regions, with officials promising volunteers monthly salaries ranging from the equivalent of US$2,150 to nearly US$5,500, plus bonuses.

The AP saw thousands of openings on job search websites for various military specialists.

The British Army said this week that Russia had formed a major new ground force called the 3rd Army Corps from “volunteer battalions”, seeking men up to the age of 50 and requiring only a secondary education, while offering ” lucrative cash bonuses” once they comply are deployed to Ukraine.

But complaints are also surfacing in the media that some are not receiving promised payments, though those reports cannot be independently verified.

In early August, Tabalov said he began receiving multiple requests for legal help from reservists who were ordered to participate in two-month training in areas near the Ukrainian border.

Prisoner recruitment has been taking place in recent weeks in as many as seven regions, said Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the prisoners’ rights group Gulagu.net, citing prisoners and their relatives his group had contacted.

This is not the first time authorities have used such a tactic, as the Soviet Union used “prisoner battalions” during World War II.

Russia is not alone either. Early in the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised amnesty to military veterans behind bars if they volunteered to fight, though it’s unclear if anything came of it.

Under the current circumstances, Osechkin said, it is not the Defense Ministry that is recruiting prisoners, but Russia’s shadowy private military force, the Wagner Group.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman known as “Putin’s chef” because of his catering contracts with the Kremlin and reportedly Wagner’s manager and financier, dismissed reports that he personally visited prisons to recruit convicts, in a statement. written published by their representatives this month. Prigozhin, in fact, denies having ties to Wagner, who has reportedly sent military contractors to places like Syria and sub-Saharan Africa.

According to Osechkin, prisoners with military or police experience were initially offered to go to Ukraine, but this was later extended to prisoners with different backgrounds. He estimated that by the end of July, around 1,500 may have applied, lured by promises of big salaries and eventual pardons.

Now, he added, many of those volunteers, or their families, contact him and seek to get out of their commitments, saying, “I really don’t want to go.”

According to the woman whose boyfriend is serving his sentence in the St. Petersburg penal colony, the offers to leave prison are “a ray of hope” for freedom. But she said he told her that out of 11 volunteers, eight died in the Ukraine. She added that one of the volunteers regretted her decision and does not believe that she will come back alive.

His account could not be independently verified, but was in line with multiple reports from independent Russian media and human rights groups.

According to those groups and military lawyers, some soldiers and law enforcement officials have refused to be sent to Ukraine or are trying to return home after a few weeks or months of fighting.

Media reports of some troops refusing to fight in Ukraine began to surface in the spring, but human rights groups and lawyers only began talking about the number of refusals reaching the hundreds last month.

In mid-July, the Free Buryatia Foundation reported that some 150 men were able to terminate their contracts with the Defense Ministry and returned from Ukraine to Buryatia, a region in eastern Siberia that borders Mongolia.

Some of the military face repercussions. Tabalov, the legal aid lawyer, said another 80 soldiers who tried to void their contracts were detained in the Russian-controlled town of Bryanka in the Lugansk region of eastern Ukraine, according to relatives. Last week, he said that the Bryanka detention center was closed due to media attention.

But the father of an officer who was detained after trying to terminate his contract told the AP this week that some are still being held in other parts of the region. The father asked not to be identified for security reasons.

Tabalov said that a military man can terminate his contract for a compelling reason, which is usually not difficult, although the decision usually rests with his commander. But he added: “In the conditions of hostilities, not a single commander would recognize such a thing, because where would they find people to fight?”

Alexandra Garmazhapova, director of the Free Buryatia Foundation, told the AP that soldiers and their families complain that commanders tear up dismissal notices and threaten “refuseniks” with prosecution. In late July, the foundation said it had received hundreds of requests from soldiers seeking to terminate their contracts.

“I get messages every day,” Garmazhapova said.

Tabalov said some soldiers complain they were misled about where they were going and didn’t expect to end up in a war zone, while others are exhausted from fighting and can’t continue.

Rarely, if ever, were they motivated by anti-war convictions, the attorney said.

Russia will continue to face problems with soldiers who refuse to fight, said military analyst Michael Kofman, but Russia’s ability to “get by … with half measures” should not be underestimated.

“You’re going to have a lot of people quitting or people basically not wanting to deploy,” Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at the Virginia-based Center for Naval Analysis, said in a recent podcast. “And they have used a lot of measures to try to keep people at bay. But ultimately, there’s not much they can do.”

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