Russia’s prison population has fallen to a historic low thanks to “humanistic” policies towards state detainees, Vladimir Davydov, Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, said in Wednesday remarks to the Russian Federation Council.
During the confirmation hearing, passing reference was made to a Russian state program put into effect in late 2022, allowing for a felon’s sentence to be ended immediately and his record wiped clean in exchange for volunteering for army service in Ukraine – but there was no discussion of their heavy casualties.
Changes to national penal law initiated in 2001 and expanded through the present have reduced the number of people held in prison colonies and pretrial detention centers in Russia to 308,000 people, the smallest figure since the Soviet era, and in pretrial detention centers to a historic low of 89,000, Davydov said.
A program launched in 2022 to pardon felons serving time in exchange for their agreement to join the national armed forces has contributed to that “success,” and in 2025 alone, courts issued more than 5,000 orders dismissing cases against individuals who had signed military service contracts, said Vladimir Khomchik, a second senior judiciary member approved during the same hearing to serve on Russia’s highest court.
“The entire procedure [for felons to become soldiers in Russia] is spelled out in law, so the law is simply followed,” Khomchik said.
An announcement by Russia’s state-run news agency TASS about the appointments praised the qualifications of the new supreme court members and reported that Davydov held “the highest qualification class of judge [and is an] Honored Lawyer of the Russian Federation.”
Russian state figures of persons held in prison or other government detention stopped being released to the public in 2023.
The independent Moscow Times, in an article analyzing Davydov’s figures, estimated that Russia’s prison population has decreased by 158,000 people over the four years of full-scale war with Ukraine, and that at a minimum 21,400 of those former felons sent to Ukraine had been killed in action. More than 200,000 former prisoners of the Russian state, in total, probably have joined the military and participated in the invasion of Ukraine, the article said.
According to Ukrainian media and military sources, losses among units formed from former prisoners of the Russian state have been catastrophically high and probably peaked in 2023 when an estimated 50,000 felons recruited by the mercenary group Wagner PMC were deployed to the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and thrown into frontal infantry assaults against prepared fortifications, BBC/Mediazona reported at that time.
Members of defending Ukrainian units commonly call such attack tactics “meat assaults” because Russian casualties usually exceed 70%, and sometimes the assaulting unit is completely wiped out by mines, drones and artillery.
In November 2022, Russia changed its law, permitting pardon of people convicted of murder, robbery, armed robbery, and drug trafficking if the convict served in the military. Russia’s State Duma in 2023 expanded the law to cover people serving sentences, convicted, and under investigation to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense, and the practice was later expanded to include defendants not yet convicted but facing investigations or trial, the Moscow Times report said.
The Ukrainian Euromaidan Press, in a November 2025 article entitled “Frontline report: Russia’s Prison-to-frontline Pipeline Breaks Down as Convicts Choose Escape Over Certain Death,” reported that Russian penal reforms designed to deliver more men to the Russian military were becoming less and less effective because word is spreading among Russian prison populations of the high lethality of combat in Ukraine, and because of widespread recruiter practice of promising relatively safe rear area duty to a recruit who, once sent to Ukraine, finds himself forcibly assigned to an assault unit.
In a February interview, a Russian soldier identifying himself as Artem Mannanikov, a resident of the west Siberian city of Surgut, told captors from the 4th National Guard Rapid Reaction Brigade “Rubizh” that he joined the military while serving a seven-year prison sentence for armed robbery. Prison guards placed him in solitary confinement for almost a year to punish him for refusing to volunteer to go fight in Ukraine, he said.
After a 13-day training period with other “cast-offs from society,” Mannanikov told his interviewer that he was sent into an assault in the eastern sector without having been issued a weapon. A Rubizh Brigade assault team approached his position in a ruined building and he surrendered, Mannanikov said.
Russian soldier Roman Timakov, 23, a resident of the west Siberian city of Kemerovo assigned to Russia’s 132nd Mechanized Brigade and taken prisoner by infantry assigned to Ukraine’s 12th National Guard Brigade “Azov” in January, told captors he decided to volunteer for army service because he felt he would die in prison before he served out a 13-year sentence for narcotics possession.
Dishonest commanders reneged on a contract giving him the right to leave the military after 18 months of service, and instead transferred him to an assault unit, Timakov claimed in content published on Jan 20. The accusation is common among Russian prisoners of war.
Assignment of substantial numbers of convicted criminals to military service has, according to some critics, undermined discipline and unit efficiency in Russia’s armed forces, and contributed to murders and crimes within the ranks.
The Kremlin policy of putting former criminals into uniform has at times also faced blowback in regions where the crimes were committed. One of the highest-profile scandals was in the Ural city of Chelyabinsk, where authorities, in November 2024 erected posters creating a “war heroes ally” in a central park, and locals recognized one posthumous honoree – Denys Sinitsyn – as the man accused and convicted for raping, murdering and then gouging the eyes out of his mother, who had a two-year-old child at the time.
It was one of the most notorious criminal cases in Chelyabinsk’s history and the placement of memorial signage honoring a convicted murderer and rapist was inappropriate, complainants said. Authorities took down the poster showing Sinitsyn in a Russian army parade uniform about ten days later.