For about a year and a half, Russia has been recruiting prisoners to fight in the war in Ukraine.

But fewer of them now say they are willing to fight for the motherland, after Russia's heavy losses on the battlefield.

Now the German newspaper claims picture President Vladimir Putin has resorted to a new means of pressure to encourage more prison inmates to enlist.

The newspaper wrote that he intends to freeze the prisoners outside the prisons and return them to service.

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– An evil plan

In several places in Russia, the mercury on the scale dropped to 35 degrees below zero.

Olga Romanova, founder of the NGO Russia Behind Bars, which cares for prisoners in Russian prisons, claims that Putin will use the cold of the explosion to make conditions in Russian prisons worse, thus pressuring prisoners to enlist in the army. .

– They want to make the conditions in the prisons unbearable, so that the men there will go to Ukraine. “That's why they simply turn off the heaters,” says Romanova.

She claims that there are few in Russia who care about prisoners who are sent to die in war.

-There is an evil plan behind this. In Russia, there are three populations for whom most people feel no sympathy when they die on the front: prisoners, minorities living in poor areas far from Moscow, and new citizens. As long as these three groups are fighting and dying in Ukraine, Putin can fool the rest of the population into thinking this is a form of normalcy, Romanova tells Bild.

– Not right

The Russian authorities came out on Sunday and announced that the information related to stopping heating operations in prisons does not correspond to reality.

– All institutions in the penal system operate normally, in accordance with the temperature standards stipulated by law. They write that there were no errors related to heating.

At the beginning of the conflict, many prisoners were recruited into the Wagner mercenary group, and sent to the front to fight in some of the toughest battles of the war.

After the death of the group's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a mysterious plane crash last year, the Russian state reportedly continued the practice, and thousands of prison inmates joined the Russian armed forces.

Convicted murderers, rapists and even cannibals are said to have been released after serving in so-called “Storm-Z” brigades.

Few survive for long, and many commit new horrific crimes after returning from war, according to Watchman.