Russia sends female prisoners to Ukraine’s war zone for the first time

Russia is believed to be sending female prisoners to the Ukrainian war zone for the first time in an effort to compensate for the heavy losses suffered by Russian forces on the front lines.

Due to the “heavy losses” in the war, Vladimir Putin sought to look for “alternative sources of manpower replenishment”, said the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Last week, a train with benches intended for transporting prisoners was moving towards the Donetsk region. one of the gigs [was for] Convicted women, ”said the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Earlier there was reliable information that Russia transported the convicted women to Koshevka in the Krasnodar Territory, not far from the war zone.

Here some female prisoners—released under a special scheme connected to the war effort—were assigned to work as farm laborers in the field as well as “greenhouses and cowsheds”, possibly posted in army supply.

Olga Romanova, of Russia’s Behind Bars Foundation, believes about 100 women have been sent to Ukraine.

Male prisoners in Russia have been recruited in the tens of thousands and offered a deal that cancels their sentences if they serve – and survive – six months on the front line.

This saw murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals freed and eventually released by Putin, most of whom serve in Wagner’s private army.

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed last month that his group would no longer recruit prisoners to fight in Ukraine — without offering an explanation as to why.

But there is evidence now The Russian Ministry of Defense registers the convicts directly.

Ukraine’s General Staff said last month that Russia was trying hard to “recruit convicted women to take part in hostilities”.

This was to “compensate for losses in personnel”.

Some were recruited from a women’s penal colony in Snezhnoye, a city in the occupied Donetsk region.

“It is also known that they were sent to the territory of the Russian Federation for training,” said the Ukrainian General Staff.

Several hundred women in prisons in the Sverdlovsk region – in the Urals – have reportedly asked local deputy Vyacheslav Wegner to send them to Ukraine.

There was “resistance” to the deployment of women to the war zone, said Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner.

However, reports indicate that women are now being deployed to the war zone although their exact role is unknown.

Heavy losses on the battlefields have also forced Putin to desperately empty Russian museums of aging tanks to repurpose them for his failed war effort.

Soviet-era footage shows aging T-62s being ‘modernized’ at a 24-hour factory in Chita, Siberia.

The drive to retrofit old tanks highlights the desperation of Putin’s military machine – while Ukraine is being supplied with the latest Western tanks.

Some of the tanks being refurbished at Factory 103 may be 60 years old, dating back to the time when Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union.

“It is sad that the number of exhibits in military museums will decrease,” said one report.

Britain’s Ministry of Defense said today that Russian ammunition shortages “have worsened to the point that severe punitive shell rationing is in effect on many parts of the front”.

“This was certainly a major reason why no Russian formation has recently been able to effect an operationally significant offensive action,” the Defense Department said in its latest intelligence briefing.