Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ Another account has emerged of Russian convicts becoming "ghost soldiers", serving in secret without pay, documentation, or dog tags to identify bodies. They are reportedly forcibly being removed from prisons and given contracts as they are being flown to Ukraine. ⬇️

2/ "We Can Explain" (MO) reports on the case of 22 year old Ilya Khanbekov, who was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for a drug offence. His mother Svetlana says he was taken from his prison and sent to fight in Ukraine with a Storm Z unit. He has since disappeared.

3/ Storm Z is effectively a revival of the Stalin-era shtrafbat (penal battalion) – a company-sized unit of convicts and possibly some mobilised soldiers being punished for being 'refuseniks'. Storm Z units are used for high-risk, high-casualty assaults.

https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1678367921989353472

4/ Ilya's mother Svetlana says that she lost contact with him in late March 2023. She was contacted by one of his cellmates from a secret phone and was told that her son had been taken to a punishment cell for 15 days.

5/ On 13 April, the prison administration told her that he was no longer being held in the facility. Three days later, Ilya called her on a borrowed phone ("there is one phone for 150 people") from Novoazovsk, a seaside town in the occupied Donetsk region near the Russian border.

6/ He told her that he had been persuaded (or forced) to go to war in while in the punishment cell. He was taken to a military airfield as part of a group of 76 convicts. "On the plane they gave him a contract with the Ministry of Defence for 6 months with a subsequent pardon."

7/ Ilya remained in touch for another 20 days. His last message at the start of May was "Love. Mum, we are on the assault." He disappeared on 9 May. Although he did not appear on any casualty lists, a fellow soldier reported that he had been killed.

8/ The Russian authorities appear to have erased Ilya's service from the record. His mother says: "The Ministry of Defence won't tell us anything. In fact, he's an escaped convict. An absolute 'ghost'."

9/ "The Ministry of Defence can't find him by his badge number [Ilya sent it to his mother shortly before his death] and claims that no such badges were issued." She has appealed without success to the regional ombudsman.

10/ Olga Romanova, the head of the prisoners' rights group 'Russia Behind Bars', says that this scenario is not unusual. "There are many cases when a body is not found and no one is looking for it."

11/ They can't identify the body by its badge and tell the relatives that there is no such badge." She also notes that convicts are not being paid and the wounded and dead are abandoned on the battlefield, as relatives have also described.

https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1680527591583653888

12/ The secrecy around the recruited prisoners is also not surprising. The Russian Ministry of Defence began recruiting from prisons after banning the Wagner Group's prisoner recruitment programme in January 2023. However, it appears to be treating them even worse than Wagner.

13/ According to the independent Russian news outlet Verstka, the authorities now classify any information about convict soldiers – removing their identities from court documents and erasing information about their criminal records, effectively deleting them from history. /end

Source:
t.me/mozhemobyasnit…