Trying to replenish the ranks of its forces at the front in Ukraine, Russia began mass recruitment of prisoners in the summer of 2022. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner’s private military group, went to the colonies to take them to fight at the front, promising them that they would return home after six months on the battlefield, a clean slate and a pardon. The Russian military took possession of the model a year ago, but Moscow has changed the rules of the game, the BBC reports.

Criminals will now face harsher conditions, and instead of returning home after six months, they must fight until the end of the war.

“If you leave now, be prepared to die,” writes a man named Serhiy in a chat room for former Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine.

The man says that since October he has been part of a new type of military unit “Storm V”, to which convicts are now assigned.

If earlier a former prisoner could return home after six months of fighting, “now we have to hold out until the end of the war,” he says.

Storm V troops are currently fighting on the front line from Zaporozhye in southern Ukraine to Bakhmut in the east.

Before his death in a plane crash in August, Prigozhin said that almost 50,000 Russian prisoners were sent to the front line, the BBC notes.

Thousands of these prisoners died, but others, including dozens of criminals convicted of violent crimes, returned home, some of them recidivists and even committing crimes.

The contract “will be automatically renewed”

The Russian military adopted the system first introduced by Prigozhin in February 2023, initially offering the same incentives. But these were privileges that outraged the contractors.

Now the new conditions for correctional prisoners are much stricter.

The wife of the convict, who signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense of Russia, is valid not for six months, as before, but for a year. And when it ends, he will not receive a pardon and will not be able to return home immediately, because the contract will be “automatically extended.”

Social media posts by other Russians whose relatives serve in Storm V units suggest they too will have to remain on the front lines until what Moscow calls a “special military operation” ends.

The training of those who make it to the Storm V is very low, most are trained on the training ground for 10 days before being sent to the front.

“Your chances of survival are about 25%”

“Your chances of survival are about 25%. I have been a soldier for five months. Out of our platoon of about 100 men, only 38 are alive,” said one of the men.

Many of those who survive become prisoners of war and are interrogated by the Ukrainian military.

The captured Russian said that Storm V fighters are often sent on “senseless raids” from which only a few return. He said that if they refuse to leave, they are put in a hole in the ground and given no food.

In the chat, Sergey discusses the fate of Russian convicts, like himself, who are still fighting in Storm V units.

“Luck won’t be enough,” he writes about his chances of survival on the front lines.

“I already know I won’t survive,” he says.