The late founder of the mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had started the practice of recruiting convicts for the war in Ukraine.
  • Russia is recruiting female convicts to boost its military forces, a Ukrainian intelligence spokesperson said.
  • Moscow wants to recruit the convicts to auxiliary and combat roles, the Kyiv Post reported.
  • More than 100,000 convicts from Russian penal colonies have reportedly been conscripted to fight in Ukraine.
  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    152·
    8 months ago

    I’m hypothesizing.

    It’s not a stretch to imagine Putin and his ilk enacting some sort of horrific policy like that. They think of their citizenry as a natural resource to be exploited in a very direct sense. They do not care about their citizens in an individual sense. They only care about their citizens in an aggregated sense inasmuch as their citizens provide utility for their own goals and enrichment. That’s what a kleptocracy is, and the Putin regime is very much a kleptocracy.