The Russian Wagner mercenary company no longer recruits convicts to fight in Ukraine alongside the Russian Army. With this announcement, its leader, the oligarch Yevgueni Prigozhin, who created the paramilitary group in 2014, surprised a few days ago. But the decision does not respond to strategic or moral issues, but to the fact that the convicts are increasingly reluctant to accept freedom in exchange for a contract that may end up costing them their lives.

Wagner began recruiting inmates into the Russian penal system in the summer of 2022.

A video published in September showed Prigozhin himself, who is close to the Kremlin, visiting a prison in Yoshkar-Ola (capital of the Russian republic of Mari-El), and promising the prisoners forgiveness if they joined his company and signed a contract. six months to fight in the Ukraine.

Until then, the businessman had always denied that he had anything to do with paramilitary training. But, in the midst of the conflict with Ukraine and with the evidence circulating on the internet, it was time to take off the mask.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, who himself spent nine years in prison in USSR times, first acknowledged that he had founded the Wagner Group in 2014, due to the start of the war in Donbass.

Since that confession, and thanks to his alignment with the most bellicose nationalist voices, together with his criticism of the command of the Army, he has become one of the most influential figures on the Moscow war scene.

It is not known for certain how many men Wagner has in the Ukraine. In Russia there are neither official nor military company figures, and it is generally accepted that they number in the tens of thousands. The UK Ministry of Defense posted an intelligence note on Twitter in late January saying that Wagner “almost certainly has up to 50,000 fighters in the Ukraine and has become a key component of the” Russian campaign in Ukraine.

Wagner has also given no information on the number of inmates who have joined his ranks. But a report by Russia’s Prison Service published in November said the prison population had fallen by more than 20,000 between August and November, the biggest drop in a decade.

In December Reuters reported that the US intelligence community believed Wagner had deployed 40,000 fighters recruited from Russian prisons to Ukraine.

However, that practice has ceased, Prigozhin said last week in a comment posted on his Telegram channel. “Yes, indeed, it is so. The recruitment of inmates by the Wagner private military company has been fully completed,” he wrote.

The businessman thus answered a question from a Russian media outlet, which pointed out that many prisoners had written that it had been more than a month since Wagner had not appeared in the penal colonies to propose joining their ranks.

“All obligations towards those who currently work for us are being fulfilled,” he said in the message, published by the press service of his Concord catering company.

According to two Russian digital media, Mediazona and Agentstvo, the information coming from the front has also reached Russian prisons, and there they have had a special impact on the fate of former inmates converted into mercenaries.

Mediazona has collected testimonies from prisoners who no longer believe in Wagner’s promises. At the end of last year “I spoke with a man who had been in Bakhmut. He said he was sorry he went there. He explained that 20% of those who had left here left alive,” said a prison inmate in the Urals.

Although no specific figures are known, the indications indicate that the number of casualties is important and that means that there are fewer and fewer prisoners willing to link their life or death to the Wagner Group. When recruiters visited prisons this winter looking for new recruits, they were no longer the gold mine of last summer.

These two outlets have denounced that Wagner tried to pressure the inmates who were reluctant to join his cause by threatening to extend their sentences.

In a case cited by Mediazona, in the summer Prigozhin managed to recruit 300 men in a prison in the Urals. But when another Wagner recruiter returned to the same prison in winter, he only managed to convince 20.