- Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has reportedly recruited tens of thousands.
- Many prisoners are now concerned that they will be forced to fight.
- Migrant laborers from Central Asian countries are particularly vulnerable.
Russia‘s Wagner mercenary group has reportedly recruited tens of thousands of prisoners to fight in Ukraine. But the growing number of casualties and extrajudicial executions make it much harder to find volunteers, even in prisons.
Many prisoners are now concerned that they will be forced to fight, and migrant laborers from Central Asian countries are particularly vulnerable.
In 2018, Anuar traveled to Russia in quest of work. He was eventually arrested for drug trafficking and sent to Penal Colony Number Six in the Vladimir region to fulfill his sentence.
At the end of January, he told his father that a group of Central Asians had been sent to fight in Ukraine without their consent. “There are lots of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz there in that prison. Now they are planning to send another group and my son is worried that they will force him to go too,”
Anuar’s letters confirm that he is serving his time in that prison. And Olga Romanova, director of the civil rights organization Russia Behind Bars, validated his claim about the group that was forced to travel to Ukraine in January. The parents of those detainees asked her for assistance.
“They were not given a choice. They were told to sign the contract and were sent to the front line like a bag of potatoes,” Ms. Romanova said.
She claims that the parents were initially willing to go to court so that their children would not wind up in Ukraine. But they rejected it because they were afraid of the punishment their children would suffer if they stayed in prison.
The ill-treatment and frequent beatings of convicts at Penal Colony Number Six are well-known. It was described as a “torture prison” by Olga Romanova. It is the location of Alexei Navalny, a notable Russian opposition figure.
The colony’s administration has yet to react to the sources’ request for comment on reports that convicts were compelled to sign military contracts.
Prison recruitment appears to have been quite successful, but things are changing when the Wagner gang suffers huge losses on the battlefield.
Uzbek sources have spoken to Farukh (not his real name), an Uzbek citizen imprisoned in Russia’s Rostov region. Wagner was joined by several of his fellow detainees. Farukh believes that at first, it was voluntary, but that now prisoners may be compelled to fight.
“In the beginning, I also considered going because everyone thought that Russia was more powerful, that Russia would win – maybe in one month, three months, or in one year. But now we see how many people are dying there and if they are short of soldiers – it’s not good. If they tell me to go and I refuse, then they can declare that I am against Russia.”
Central Asian nationals are recruited to fight for Russia in a variety of settings other than prisons. According to the most recent Russian Interior Ministry statistics, there are approximately 10.5 million migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan working in Russia. That’s a huge resource for military headhunters to tap into.
At the Moscow migration-center, Russian authorities openly sign up people to join the armed forces. There are even advertisements in Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Tajik offering inhabitants of these nations a quicker path to obtaining a Russian passport if they join the armed forces.
However, activists claim that it is not always voluntary.
Valentina Chupik, a migrant rights advocate, told the sources that police officers occasionally stopped Central Asian migrants on the street and coerced them into signing a military contract. They were told that if they did not comply, they would be deported, according to Ms Chupik.
Many labor migrants do not have valid work permits, live somewhere other than where they are registered, or break other immigration restrictions. As a result, they can be a tempting target for recruiters.
According to the sources, Aziz, who has both Russian and Tajik citizenship, was detained during a police raid at the construction site where he works. He was told he’d be taken to a police station to have his ID checked but instead found himself in a military enlistment office. When he began yelling at cops, demanding to know why they had lied to him, they wrenched his arms and tossed him back into the bus.
They eventually let him go.
However, many migrants in Russia are too terrified of law enforcement to resist being drafted for the war.
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