At the end of 2022, reports emerged that female convicts in Russia -- just like their male counterparts -- were being recruited to serve in the invasion of Ukraine. About 1,000 women, according to human rights groups, were sent to war. Some of the women died; some returned home after being pardoned of their crimes. RFE/RL spoke to one of the lucky few who both survived and was released after serving.
In the summer of 2023, Yelena* enlisted to join Russia's invasion of Ukraine from a prison colony in the Lipetsk region of western Russia. She was serving time for drug offenses. She agreed to speak to RFE/RL only after much persuasion, as she said she had no desire to relive her experiences.
"I don't have any special education. I just worked as a saleswoman for several years," the woman said. "They didn't ask for anything [during recruitment]. They only checked my age and health and then signed me up as a sniper. What a joke! I had never held a gun in my hands."
A dining room in the women's Penal Colony No. 2 in Ulyanovka, in northwest Russia. Around 50 convicts from this prison signed a contract to join Russia's war effort.
Yelena never ended up on the front lines.
"I wound up working as a nurse for a unit in the Donetsk region. Now I think that I was lucky because I heard that many [from the same prison colony] are now dead," Yelena said. "And I was lucky that they did, in fact, release me. I still had five more years of my sentence to serve.
"They didn't train us for anything. They dumped us into the medical unit, and that's it. They didn't even ask me anything. I still don't know whether they fulfilled their promises to anyone about training women to be snipers and pilots. I myself was not at the front with the unit. I mostly just cooked and fought off the advances of the soldiers."
It is believed around 1,000 female convicts signed up to serve in Ukraine before the program was apparently scrapped by the Kremlin.
The Ulyanovka prison, from where around 50 women signed a contract to go to Ukraine (file photo)
The friend of another recruit told RFE/RL that the vast majority of women prisoners sent to war were addicted to drugs or alcohol.
"Do you realize what kind of people these are? These are hardened addicts; these are thieves," the woman said. "Maybe I'm overstating it when I say they are all like that, but probably this is 90 percent of the women in prison. The military recruited from this population.
"I told my friend, 'Do you understand what you are signing up for? You'll be cannon fodder there. Even healthy men are dying like flies in Ukraine. Why would you go?!'
"The bulk of prisoners who signed up to go to Ukraine are brainless junkies whose only dream is to go out and buy themselves some new boots. Their main motivation was money. The Defense Ministry, of course, promised them mountains of gold, and parole. They even claimed there would be 'praise and glory,' that the women would be carried aloft by people when they return. Well, this was all bulls**t, as we have seen."
Women convicts make clothing inside a prison in the Moscow region in March 2022.
Today, there are around 400,000 prisoners in Russian prisons, with 8 percent (around 32,000) of them women.
Yelena, who had her sentence commuted after serving in Ukraine, says the female prisoners were paid less than they were offered during recruitment.
"They promised half a million rubles ($5,600) to sign, and then 200,000 rubles ($2,240) every month. In fact, only around 100,000 rubles was paid monthly, and the signing bonus was also around half of what was promised."
But being cheated out of her salary was the least of her concerns.
"I wasn't angry, I was scared. I was just hoping I could get out alive. That's what I was focused on," she said.
"It was terrifying, all these drunken faces and antics. But when the next batch of [wounded] was brought in, I could see that the people in that situation were really in hell," Yelena said.
A 2017 file photo of a woman in Russian-controlled Donetsk undergoing qualification testing.
Yelena says that when she signed on, she was able to read the contract while in prison. Later, she says, convicts served in the war and then were forced to return to prison.
"They earned money, then were sent 'home to their bunks,'" she said. "But they didn't know this! This was not told to them during recruitment."
She says the military contracts were often presented to the convicts after they had been taken out of prison grounds.
"So they rounded them all up, stuffed them into paddy wagons, and took them somewhere where they signed this contract. They don't know the conditions [in the contract] because they don't have time to read them. By the time they realize they won't get parole, it's too late. They've already left the prison."
Yelena says by now it is widely known among the prison population that parole will not follow service in the war, but many convicts are still willing to sign up.
Russian volunteers ride an armored personnel carrier in the Donetsk region in November 2023.
According to human rights activists who work with prisoners, although the Defense Ministry recruited women who agreed to fight, they were never sent to the front.
"Their experiment -- to send women to the front -- was a failure, to put it mildly," Marina, a human rights activist, said of the Kremlin initiative.
"The appearance of women didn't add any discipline," she said, "and they already had enough problems at the front with the male prisoners drinking and taking drugs."
Another human rights activist said that the last recruitment of female prisoners was in September 2023 from a facility in Russia's Leningrad region.
"They were housed separately for three months and promised training, but it's not known whether that ever happened. In the end, they were never taken anywhere to serve," she said.