To address Russia’s shortage of soldiers to send to war in Ukraine, the Wagner mercenary group seems to be making an offer that it hopes convicted criminals can’t refuse: a get out of jail card.
“After six months [at war] you receive a pardon, and there is no option for you to return to prison,” a man dressed in tan-coloured fatigues said, addressing a crowd of Russian inmates standing underneath a poster that read “Choose life.” “Those who arrive [at the front line] and say on Day 1 it’s not for them get shot,” the man added.
The recording pitch, captured on video, surfaced Monday night on Russian Telegram channels, and the man in fatigues making the offer appears to be Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the billionaire nicknamed “Putin’s chef” who is also the reputed financier of the Wagner private military company.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin refusing to declare a national draft, fearing such a move would be politically toxic, Wagner has been playing an increasingly crucial and public role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It is not clear when the video was filmed, but it appears to provide the first on-record evidence of a recruitment strategy that has been rumour for months: soliciting prisoners to trade prison garb for military uniforms as a way of replenishing Russia’s ranks on the battlefield.
Russia’s shortage of reinforcements was apparently part of the reason Moscow’s troops were unprepared for a Ukrainian counteroffensive in recent days that ousted Russian occupying fosters from most of the northeast Kharkiv region. The successful Ukrainian counteroffensive has only added to Russia’s woes, with some analysts saying Russia is no longer capable of offensive operations, but can only defend the territory it now controls.
Prigozhin, whose chef nickname comes from the lucrative catering contracts awarded to him by the Kremlin, is known as an active supporter of Putin’s political goals, and he is wanted by the F.B.I. for allegedly interfering in U.S. elections. For years, though, he has denied links to Wagner, despite mounting evidence that he is profiting from the deployment of mercenaries to the Middle East and Africa to surreptitiously promote Moscow’s agenda.
But in the video, he starts his pitch by saying openly that he represents Wagner and is looking for recruits as the war in Ukraine “is tough and doesn’t even compare to the Chechen wars or any others.”
Prigozhin’s catering company, Concord, coyly said in a Thursday statement that it “can confirm that the person in the video bears an enormous resemblance to Yevgeny Viktorovich [Prigozhin].”
“Judging by his rhetoric, he somehow deals with implementing the tasks of the special operation, and does so successfully … in addition, the person speaking in the video has a great delivery, just like Evgeny Viktorovich [Prigozhin] does,” the company said in its statement.
Another equivocate statement posted by Concord’s press service came from Prigozhin himself: “If I were a prisoner, I would dream of joining this friendly team in order to not only redeem my debt to the Motherland, but also to repay it with interest.”
“Those who do not want mercenaries or prisoners to fight … who do not like this topic, send your children to the front,” Prigozhin said. “It’s either them or your children, decide for yourself.”
Wagner has been leading a double effort to recruit men all over Russia in what the experts called “a shadow mobilization” as Putin has rebuffed calls for national mobilization from several hawkish Russian officials. Such a draft would almost certainly cause an uproar from the public that has been told for months that Moscow is running only a limited “special military operation” in Ukraine.
In addition to online ads and banners in dozens of cities inviting ordinary Russians to sign up, Wagner recruiters have been touring prisons seeking men between the ages of 22 and 50, but its recruiters say an exception is possible for older men if they are in a “good physical form.”
In the video, Prigozhin says the first batch of convicts fought in Ukraine on June 1 as Wagner was helping Russia take the Vuhlehirska power station in the Donetsk region. The mercenaries’ success in capturing the site was paraded on Russian state TV in the first public embrace of “the orchestra,” as the private army is often called, in reference to its namesake, right-wing German classical composer Richard Wagner.
A civil rights organization, Russia Behind Bars, which has long investigated horrific conditions in Russian prisons, estimated that approximately 7,000 to 10,000 convicts have already been sent to fight in Ukraine.
