The Violent Homecoming of Russian Convicts Freed to Fight in Ukraine: Wave of New, Brutal Crimes Comes as Former Prisoners Finish Military Contracts and Go Home; ‘thousands of criminals are walking our streets’; A Prison at War: The Convicts Sustaining Putin’s Invasion

WSJ: The Violent Homecoming of Russian Convicts Freed to Fight in Ukraine

In early August, police in Russia’s rural northwest were called to the scene of a mass murder. In the charred remains of two homes set ablaze hours earlier, they found the burned, mutilated bodies of six local residents.

News of the massacre shook Derevyannoye, a village of 1,200 people, where sailing boats bob in Onega Lake and the border with Finland is a three-hour drive away. What was most shocking was the identity of one of the two suspects: a repeat offender freed from a maximum-security prison to fight in Ukraine.

Igor Sofonov had been in and out of jail for 20 years by the time he joined Storm Z, a unit of convicts created to bolster Russia’s war effort. If he and others survived long enough to complete their six-month contracts, they were promised their freedom through a secretive program of presidential pardons.

Sofonov survived, and returned to Russia with the remainder of his sentence for drug trafficking erased. He is among around 30,000 enlisted ex-prisoners, many of whom had been serving long prison terms for violent crimes, who have returned home to liberty.

Many are traumatized by their experiences of war, in which their underequipped, all-convict units, such as Storm Z, were commonly used in near-suicidal assaults. Others are emboldened by a Kremlin narrative that portrays them as heroes deserving respect.

Communities across Russia have been brutalized by scores of crimes perpetrated by these returning convicts, according to a Wall Street Journal review of court documents, interviews with friends and relatives of suspects and victims, and reports in Russian media. Rights activists said dozens more go unreported.

One man staged a shootout in a cafe, killing one person and seriously wounding another, according to court documents. Another is accused of raping two girls. A third, who had been convicted of murder three times, poured gasoline on his sleeping sister and burned her alive, according to the court’s press office.

The offenses committed by the convict soldiers risk shattering Russian President Vladimir Putin’s narrative that the war protects Russia from its enemies.

“I don’t feel safe. Thousands of criminals are walking our streets,” said Anna Pekaryova, whose grandmother Yulia Buyskikh was killed in March by a convicted murderer, Ivan Rossomakhin. He had wandered the streets of her village 600 miles east of Moscow—swinging an ax and carrying a pitchfork—after fighting for the Wagner paramilitary force in Ukraine and returning a free man. “I have lost count how many times such crimes have happened.”

Prison Population Shrinks —>LOTS MORE HERE

NYT: A Prison at War: The Convicts Sustaining Putin’s Invasion:

Aleksandr Mokin had lost the will to live.

Convicted of selling drugs and ostracized by his family, he endured abuse from guards and frequent spells in solitary confinement at a high-security Russian prison. He told a friend he felt alone and racked with guilt.

Then, in the summer of 2022, Mr. Mokin and other inmates in Penal Colony No. 6 in the Chelyabinsk region started hearing rumors. One of Russia’s most powerful men was reportedly touring jails and offering pardons for prisoners who survived six months of fighting in Ukraine.

And by October of last year, there he was, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, standing before them in his military fatigues, himself an ex-con who now ran a private military company, Wagner. He offered freedom and money, even as he warned that the price for many would be death. Mr. Mokin and 196 other inmates enlisted the same day.

“I really wish to be there, knowing that this is likely to be a journey without return,” Mr. Mokin, then 35 and serving an 11-year sentence, told a friend in a text message that was viewed by The New York Times.

Two months later, Mr. Mokin was dead. A social media post showing his grave is the only known public tribute to his short life.

As the war in Ukraine grinds to a stalemate, Mr. Mokin’s ultimate legacy may be his small role in a much bigger, globally significant enterprise: He was one of tens of thousands of convicts powering the Kremlin’s war machine. Even now, with Mr. Prigozhin dead and Wagner disbanded, Russian inmates are still enlisting in what has become the largest military prison recruitment program since World War II.

In Ukraine, these former inmates have been used mostly as cannon fodder. But they have bolstered the ranks of Russia’s forces, helping President Vladimir V. Putin postpone a new round of mobilization, which would be an unpopular measure domestically. And since many of the inmates come from poor families and rural areas, it has helped Mr. Putin to maintain the veneer of normalcy among well-off Russians in major cities.

“When civilians are mobilized, they are ripped from their families, their jobs,” Aleksandr, one of the surviving recruits from the prison, known as IK6, said in an interview. “As for us, we’ve got nothing to lose.”

Some of the inmates’ reasons for choosing the war were obvious. Many said they were driven by patriotism, a desire to escape prison or a craving for action after years of confinement. —>LOTS MORE HERE

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