Ukraine, Western intelligence and Russian human rights advocates estimate that about 40,000 Russian inmates joined the mercenary Wagner Group, beginning in July. About 30,000 of them have since been killed in action, deserted or wounded.
Their service contracts for fighting, dying or barely surviving in Ukraine expire in six months. Which means that roughly 10,000 war veterans and former convicts — some serving time for petty crimes, such as theft, but others for aggravated rape or murder — are now being unleashed on Russian society.
As the Times puts it, the "challenge" presented to Russia is that of "reintegrating thousands of traumatized men with military training, a history of crime and few job prospects." Or, one could think of this thousands-fold collective in the words of Agent K, of Men in Black: "Imagine a giant cockroach, with unlimited strength, a massive inferiority complex, and a real short temper, is tear-assing around Moscow in a brand-new Edgar suit."
Some of these violent young men actually prefer the slaughterhouse of the Ukrainian front. Says one, at home for only three weeks: "I liked everything over there. The civilian life is boring." And so back to the front he's going.
For those who remain in Russian society, their history of a tough prison life combined with the mental scars of war and Wagner's cruelty in their brief military training will likely conspire to create a domestic army of Frankenstein monsters. Wagner's founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, used "questionable, and possibly illegal, methods" in recruiting these men. From there, their lives got much worse.
"There are no chances of returning to the [penal] colony," said Prigozhin to one group of inmates in September. He promised summary executions for those who disobeyed orders — and sure enough, once at the front, some of the disobedient have simply disappeared from the ranks.
"We were told, 'Keep going until you’re killed,'" said one Wagner member, who deserted. He escaped Prigozhin's other promise: "Those who get there and say 'I think I’m in the wrong place' will be marked as deserters and shot."
Wagner's entire scheme of prison recruitment collides with Russian law, or at the very least, "circumvents legal precedent." Because in Russia, recruiting mercenaries is illegal. But it's nice to be king. Hence "on paper," reports the times, Vladimir Putin's "prisoners never went to war, but were merely transferred to Russian jails near the Ukrainian border."
Given, shall we say, the reluctance of everyday Russian men to join the army and die in Ukraine, Prigozhin has, of late, been emphasizing to Russian prisoners the ultimate payoff of enlistment: their freedom. "I needed your criminal talents to kill the enemy in the war," says Prigozhin in one video. "Those who want to return, we are waiting for you to come back."
But what then? What awaits a society bubbling with thousands of war-brutalized criminals? It seems Putin gave no more thought to that ramification than he did the invasion.