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March 25 () –
More than 5,000 criminals have received pardon after serving the stipulated period within the Russian mercenary group Wagner to fight in Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict, the organization’s founder, Yevgeni Prigozhin, announced this Saturday.
“At this moment, more than 5,000 people have been released under pardon after completing their contracts with Wagner,” Prigozhin said in a message posted on Telegram and picked up by the Russian newspaper ‘Kommersant’.
In his message, Prigozhin says — citing studies by the group itself — that only 0.31 percent of those pardoned have relapsed into criminal activity, a figure “between 10 and 20 times lower than the usual average.”
Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine just over a year ago, Prigozhin has enjoyed, according to the UK, unlimited access to Russian prisons to recruit prisoners willing to go to war in exchange for their release if they survived at least six months.
However, many of them did not have the necessary military preparation to undertake an undertaking of this magnitude. According to the British Intelligence service, half of the 40,000 prisoners who were recruited have died.
Last week, Wagner announced a recruitment campaign in sports centers in almost fifty Russian cities, with which they hope to register some 30,000 new volunteers.
