Almost a year ago, in March, I took a taxi and, as usual, I started chatting with the driver. Barely a few weeks after the start of the “special military operation” in Ukraine launched on February 24, I naturally asked him what he thought of it. Of Chechen origin, the latter told me that they had just recruited prisoners from the prison of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, to send them to the front.
That didn’t surprise me much. I had already heard of such recruitments in Russian penal colonies in 2014, when Crimea was annexed. But, at the time, their number was quite small and little attention had been paid to them.
The situation completely changed in the summer of 2022. A lawyer friend told me that the businessman Yevgeny Prigojine, the boss of the paramilitary group Wagner, came in person, by helicopter, to the penal colony where one of his clients, in order to recruit inmates there.
Yevgueni Prigozhin, “Putin’s cook”, is one of the few men who, according to some media, has direct access to the Russian president.
For several months, the latter continued his tour of the penal colonies, offering prisoners to go to the Ukrainian front in
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