Yevgeny Prigozhin has been touring Russian prisons in an increasingly desperate bid to recruit more soldiers to send into Ukraine. The Wagner supremo is now accused of using “pressure” to recruit raped and abused prisoners from Russia’s penal colonies to join the mercenary group’s frontline fighting units where they are being slaughtered with little training and poor equipment.
Russia’s penal system has the remnants of a Soviet-era prison caste system which has an underclass known as ‘the Shamed’ at the bottom. This lowest caste—also known as ‘Roosters,’ which is a homophobic slur—includes prison rape victims, gay prisoners and outcasts who are regularly beaten and abused.
Russian prison observers tell The Daily Beast that ‘the Shamed’ are being recruited by Wagner—Putin’s private army—as cannon-fodder who rarely survive long in “Prigozhin’s meat grinder.”
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In an audio message provided to The Daily Beast, a convict in the IK-7 prison colony in Novgorod says his recruited friends were “thrown into the battle” after just one week of training. The group was under fire near Bakhmut last week. One of his friends, who was seriously wounded, called IK-7 from his hospital bed. “He is one of the ‘the Shamed;’ his face was ripped up in a drone explosion, we spoke on a video call,” the prisoner explained on tape. “Most of them are not alive any longer; another ‘Shamed’ guy Sashka Shabanov has been killed. Although he was ‘Shamed,’ he was a good guy.”
The prisoners of this lowly caste live nightmarish lives behind bars in Russian corrective and labor colonies. Both prison administrators and other convicts use the label to sexually abuse or urinate on weaker prisoners, who are made to tackle the worst jobs like cleaning the toilets and are treated as though they are contagious outcasts.
“Prisoners in the Wagner mercenary army have no chance to survive, ‘the Shamed’ are dying as if they are pushed through a meat grinder,” Olga Romanova, the founder of the Russia Behind Bars group of independent prison observers, told The Daily Beast.
Prigozhin—whose nickname “Putin’s chef” dates from his earlier catering contracts with the Kremlin—started recruiting Russian prisoners in July. The move followed two months of failed attempts to seize the city of Bakhmut in Donetsk.
“This is dehumanization—to achieve absolute obedience, control, Prigozhin tries to completely destroy everything human in people,” Nina Khurshcheva, professor of International Affairs at the New School in New York, told The Daily Beast.
Crimes are being committed against Russian citizens with impunity while the eight-month war rages on. Police have arrested thousands of people who have dared to complain or march all across Russia.
One ex-convict and victim of torture, Ruslan Vakhapov, now works as a human rights defender observing colonies in his home region of Yaroslav. He tries to help convicts avoid Wagner’s recruitment. According to Russia Behind the Bars, Prigohin has recruited over 6,000 prisoners to fight in Ukraine promising them amnesty and a monthly salary from $1,500 to $3,000 a month.
“We try to protect the inmates from the massacre, they have no right, no agreement, zero paperwork; if Wagner stole most of the money they have promised the convicts, nobody would notice,” Vakhapov told The Daily Beast. During the first few weeks Wagner preferred to recruit only murderers and robbers, Vakhapov told The Daily Beast on Friday. But as the violent battles for Donbas continued, “they were grabbing everybody, including dozens of the so-called ‘Shamed,’ people who are terribly humiliated in prisons. At least nine coffins with nailed down lids came back to the IK-6 penal colony.”
By September it became clear that convicts were the only option Prigozhin had left to keep replacing his depleted ranks of private soldiers.
Marat Gabidullin, a veteran commander of Wagner’s mercenaries told The Daily Beast that the whole enterprise had become grotesque. “This massacre in Ukraine takes billions of rubbles; this is not my war. Prigozhin has utter indifference for the loss of human life, he is turning Russia into one more Syria.”
According to Russian human rights groups, Wagner is losing more than 50 percent of all recruited prisoners in battles for Ukraine’s cities. “The first group of 47 convicts recruited from the Leningrad oblast did not return—they all died,” said Olga Romanova. “Only one man survived from the group of 68 prisoners taken to the front in the Bakhmut region in July—he was wounded in the back and he lost one hand but they still took him back to the combat zone."
Mothers, girlfriends, and wives of convicts have realized that there is a little chance of survival for Prigozhin’s recruits. Four women came to protest the recruitment of their loved ones who they say were put “under pressure” at the IK-25 prison colony in the Chelyabinsk region on Saturday. They arrived right on time, just before two convicts were going to be sent to Ukraine. They managed to stop their departure but fear that the men will be severely punished by the prison administration for turning the recruitment down. “Can you imagine what will happen now? They will be placed in punishment cells, this is unbearable,” the mother of one of the convicts told local reporters.
Mercenary armies are technically outlawed in Russia but Wagner and other groups have now come out of the shadows, and openly advertise recruitment on billboards. “I am in constant touch with my former colleagues at the Molkino base in Krasnodar region. They say they grab anybody who walks in with a passport and in a couple days they send them into combat zone,” Gabidullin said. He claimed that Putin’s private army is mostly financed by Russian military intelligence, GRU. “Many senior PMC Wagner officers have antisemitic, far-right views, they say they belong to Rodnovers, which is a pagan religion. A human life is not worth anything for Prigozhin.”
