“If you sign up now, get ready to die, mate.” Life on the Ukrainian front for Moscow’s new ‘Storm V’ convict soldiers
“If you sign up now, get ready to die, mate.” Life on the Ukrainian front for Moscow’s new ‘Storm V’ convict soldiers
No more presidential pardons, and rolling contracts to the end of the war.
By Elizaveta Fokht, Ilya Barabanov, Olga Ivshina.
Russia has been sending prisoners to fight in Ukraine for a year and half. Until now, they were tempted to the frontline by the prospect of a pardon and a clean criminal record. Even those convicted of violent crimes could be freed after serving a six-month contract. But BBC Russian can reveal this deal is now a thing of the past: rather than a pardon from President Putin, convicts now just get ‘conditional release’ – and instead of going home early, they will have to keep fighting until the end of the war.
"The contract will be extended automatically"
"We set off in October. The paperwork says ‘conditional release’."
“My brother left in October: all of them knew they’d get parole and not a pardon.”
“According to the documents, you get ‘conditional release’. It’s like for contract soldiers, but you don’t get a pardon and you have to serve to the end of the Special Military Operation.”
You can find messages like this in many online chats where relatives of those sent from prison camps to the Ukrainian front stay in touch.
It was in the summer of 2022 that the mass recruitment of prisoners for the war started. To begin with, the drive was led by the head of the ‘Wagner’ private military company, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in a mysterious plane crash in August. Since February, the military has taken over deploying convicts to the front. Both Prigozhin and the Ministry of Defence offered the same deal to lure them into war: a presidential pardon, six months at the frontline as a stormtrooper, and you get to go home.
According to Prigozhin, almost 50,000 Russians were dispatched to the front under this scheme. Similar figures have been cited by human rights activists and journalists who have investigated Federal Penitentiary Service data. Thousands of prisoners died, but some, including dozens convicted of serious violent crimes, did indeed return home.
The military refers to former prisoners as the ‘special cohort’ and usually classifies them as volunteers. The majority were gathered into units collectively dubbed ‘Storm Z’. These units were sent to where the front line battles were fiercest. When talking about ‘Storm Z’, both military analysts and the fighters themselves use the same term: ‘pushechnoe myaso’ – cannon meat.
Social media chats among relatives of ‘Storm Z’ soldiers show that recruitment to these units effectively ceased in August last year. From September, prisoners were assigned to new units with a new name – ‘Storm V’. From messages in chatrooms and the accounts of fighters and relatives we have spoken to, the BBC can confirm that ‘Storm V’ troops are serving right across the front, from Bakhmut to Zaporizhzhia, but under totally different conditions to their predecessors.
One woman from Zabaykalsky Krai in Siberia, who wished to remain anonymous, told us that her husband was recruited into one of the ‘Storm V’ squads at the beginning of the autumn. She did not reveal what crime he had committed, “but it's a serious charge”.
“This February would have been 15 years since he was sentenced. He had another four to go,” she said. “Conditions in the prison were ok: he could have continued to serve his sentence, but this [deployment to the front] was our joint choice. It was the only way to get him home quickly."
She said he was sent off to the front as a fully-fledged contractor with his own identification tag. The contract term with the Ministry of Defence, however, was not six months, as it had been before, but a year. And when the term is up, he won’t be able to go home: "It will be automatically extended," she says.
Posts from other Russians whose relatives are serving in ‘Storm V’ also indicate they will have to stay on the front until the end of the so-called Special Military Operation – Moscow’s name for the war. Prisoners are given warning of this when they sign up, and it follows a September 2022 decree by Vladimir Putin which essentially prohibits terminating contracts even when they expire. It puts former prisoners in the same boat as other soldiers, both regular and conscripted. The fact that they were previously in a more privileged position, and could go home after six months, used to upset families of mobilised men.
The children’s television director, Ilya Belostotsky, is among the former prisoners serving in a ‘Storm V’ unit. Belostotsky was convicted of child rape in 2022, but had his sentence reduced and reclassified as ‘depraved acts not involving force’. He told the BBC he has been assigned to a team responsible for removing bodies and the wounded from the battlefield – as a young man he had studied at a medical institute for a few years. He confirmed that his fighting status is ‘conditional release’, and that his one-year contact will very likely be extended at the end of 2024.
The woman from Zabaykalsky Krai also confirmed that unlike prisoners in the past, her husband had not received a presidential pardon. He was allowed out of prison on ‘conditional early release’. That phrase is found in dozens of messages in social media groups where relatives of prisoners stay in touch.
From a legal point of view, ‘conditional early release’ can only be granted by a court. So for prisoners recruited for the war effort the term used is simply ‘conditional release’ – a new provision that only appeared on the statute books in June last year. No court order is required, just the prisoner’s own decision, and the process is handled by the penal colony and the draft office where he signs his contract.
Under this new law, the only way to get a full release and a cleaned-up criminal record is if you get a state decoration, lose your health, reach the maximum age limit, or if the war itself ends. These are far more strict conditions than those previously on offer to prisoners.
Importantly, Putin no longer has to get involved in the process. In the past, he had to personally sign pardons for the prisoners. From now, there will be fewer unwelcome headlines in the media about the president pardoning people convicted of murder and sex crimes.
The new norm of ‘conditional release’ also means that prisoners previously banned from signing a military contract – such as those convicted of specific sex crimes against minors – are allowed to serve in the new ‘Storm V’ units. The children’s TV director Belostotsky chose this rather than sit out his term or apply for parole, which he didn’t think he would get because of the nature of his crime. “Such convictions are too toxic in the public mind, thanks to journalists like you,” he said. So he decided to go to the front.
He declined to reveal the specific location where he is serving, citing secrecy. “I saw in the New Year doing guard duty with a rifle in my hands,” he said. “The strangest New Year ever.” The day after we spoke to him he was sent back to the front.
"If you sign up now, get ready to die, mate"
In a chatroom with men who had been at the front in ‘Storm V’ units, a prisoner called Leonid wants to know what the deal is nowadays:
"Are the service conditions the same as they were six months ago?" he asks.
"Well, the conditions are sort of better. You get full pay, like for the military, and all the other benefits and allowances,” is the response. Leonid is chatting with two men who say they have spent several months at the front. One says he was recently wounded and is in hospital. The other says he is in Ukraine still, not far from the frontline.
"So it means there are more chances to survive now, guys?" Leonid asks.
“You’re wrong. You are so wrong! Your chances of survival are about 25%. I’ve been a stormtrooper for five months, and every combat mission is like being born again. Out of our platoon [about 100 men] only 38 are still alive.”
“That’s harsh. I guess I’ll have to sit it out. And I had been hoping for the best,” concludes Leonid.
Since last January, the BBC has partnered with Mediazona and a team of volunteers to identify the names of Russian fighters killed in the war. More than 8,000 prisoners have died serving in Ukraine, and at least 1,100 of them fought in ‘Storm Z’ or ‘Storm V’ units.
We only include in our database those prisoners whose sentences have been confirmed by a published court verdict. But not all verdicts are digitised, and not all deaths are reported publicly. In reality, the number of dead convicts is far higher.
‘Storm V’ fighters regularly end up in captivity. The BBC has found two videos in which two such prisoners of war are being interrogated by the Ukrainian military. In one, a resident of Chelyabinsk region, Yevgeny Rumyantsev, tells the camera that he had been in prison several times since 2014 for grievous bodily harm and theft – sentences the BBC has confirmed in court records.
In October, Rumyantsev signed a contract with the defence ministry and went to the front from a high-security facility in the Kirov region. He was sent first to Rostov-on-Don, like most former prisoners, and then to Luhansk in occupied eastern Ukraine. He trained at a shooting range for a month. Soon after, he was captured.
Rumyantsev told his interrogators that ‘Storm V’ fighters are often sent on “pointless assaults” from which only a few individuals return. If you refuse to go, you are put in a pit in the ground and deprived of food. The account matches that of the woman from Siberia that we spoke to – her husband had told her the same thing.
Vladimir Khanov is another ‘Storm V’ captive whose interrogation emerged on social media.
He set off to the front from a prison in the Urals where he was doing time for theft. Again, we confirmed the sentence in court records. Like Rumyantsev, he had also been through Rostov, trained for a month, and was then wounded and captured.
Working out how many ‘Storm’ fighters have been killed is extremely difficult. Both those who survive and their relatives agree in saying that the dead are not evacuated for weeks. Some relatives are still looking for former prisoners who were last in touch in the summer.
"This hell will never end. I never thought I would be glad just to find his bones. Just to bury them properly,” writes one mother in a chatroom. “I pray every day for them to find my son, at least a part of his body, to return it to the earth. He died back in June.”
Even soldiers whose death has been confirmed by his fellow soldiers and a commanding officer can remain officially on the ‘missing’ lists for months. And those whose bodies are finally retrieved from the battlefield may wait a long time to be identified. Many had no documents on them when they were killed, and dog tags issued to ‘Storm Z’ prisoners are not linked to any military database – meaning morgue staff can’t match the tag number to a person.
"I've been looking for my classmate for five months now. He died in September near Rabotino,” reads a post in a ‘Storm’ relatives chatroom. “The commander called, said they took the bodies to Rostov. Called there many times: they say he is not among the identified. The parents provided DNA, but still no update."
‘Storm V’ dog tags are recorded into defence ministry databases as they are now processed as military personnel rather than volunteers. Yet like ‘Storm Z’ ex-convicts before them, ‘Storm V’ recruits are deployed to the most dangerous areas of the Ukrainian front. Some are trained at a range for as little as 10 days before being despatched. There are several dozen known cases of convicts who have found themselves on the front line after only three to five days of instruction. For comparison, Soviet conscripts in Afghanistan got up to six months training before deployment.
"If you sign up now, be ready to die, mate,” writes a man called Sergei in a chat. He claims to have been fighting in ‘Storm V’ since October.
“It was back then that they could slip through. You could wing it through six months. But till the end of the war… luck isn’t gonna be enough. I already know I won’t make it.”
BBC is blocked in Russia. We’ve attached the story in Russian as a pdf file for readers there.
Read this story in Russian here.
English version edited by Chris Booth.
