Russia has pardoned the first batch of prisoners recruited from prisons by Wagner’s group after they served six months of military service in Ukraine, the leader of the paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said on Thursday, according to The Moscow Times.

“They fulfilled their contract. They worked with honor and dignity. They were the first. No one in this world works as hard as they do,” Prigozhin told one of the Russian state news agencies, RIA Novosti.

He also said that more than 20 prisoners who joined Wagner’s group to fight in Ukraine have been pardoned so far, calling them ordinary people who got into trouble “by mistake” or “because of their character.”

Prigozhin also noted that Russian society should be grateful to the prisoner for fighting for the “national interests” of Russia, given the chance to do so.

RIA Novosti also quotes a former detainee as saying that he plans to return to fight alongside Wagner’s mercenaries as a paid soldier.

Wagner’s group began recruiting in Russian prisons last summer

Since early July, Russian investigative journalists have reported that prisons as well as some companies in Russia have begun recruiting volunteers to fight in Ukraine, with some of the “persuasion” efforts being carried out by Wagner’s mercenary group.

An investigation published by iStories, an investigative website registered outside of Russia to circumvent Moscow-imposed censorship, said Wagner’s group resorted to making offers to inmates of penitentiaries and colonies in St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, the fifth city as the largest in Russia, promising them a high salary and amnesty in exchange for 6 months of military service.

According to the same source, instead of written contracts, the detainees were given verbal promises that their families would receive compensation of 5 million rubles ($90,500) if they died in Ukraine.

Later, videos of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s personal participation in recruitment appeared on social networks, and the Russian parliament developed a draft law that provides for the possibility of exemption from punishment for certain categories of convicts who “show courage and heroism” in combat operations. .

The comments made on Thursday by Prigozhin, who only admitted last September that he founded the paramilitary group in 2014, came just days after he was filmed in a basement filled with the corpses of his fighters.

“They’re out of contract, they’re going home next week. Preparing for shipment. On New Year’s Eve, we all work. The soldiers of Wagner who died at the front rest here. Now they have been placed in zinc coffins and they will return home,” he said in the video.

Follow the latest events of the 316th day of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HOTNEWS.RO.