The Russian Defense Ministry has begun to recruit new soldiers from among the inmates of Russia’s so-called “red” penal colonies. This is a class of penal institutions where some of the inmates are former law-enforcement and state-security servicemen. In “red” colonies, convicts are permitted to organize a good deal of their daily life, unlike the other “castes” of inmates in the Russian penal system. According to the #media project Vazhnye Istorii (iStories), no later than the end of September, the Ministry of Defense began to recruit soldiers for a new formation called Storm among the people currently imprisoned in the “red” colonies. #Military recruitment among convicts used to be something only done by Evgeny #Prigozhin, the notorious founder of the #WagnerGroup — Prigozhin’s “private military company” that fought in #Syria in 2015, and is now taking part in #Russia’s #war against #Ukraine. But now the Defense Ministry, led by Sergey #Shoigu, is taking Prigozhin’s lead — by trying to find new conscripts among the #prison|ers.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/10/11/the-wagner-group-s-best-practices-go-mainstream #ossetia #luhansk