The Defense Ministry created experimental battalions of female prisoners. They faced sexual violence, extortion, and threats of being “zeroed out”

The Defense Ministry created experimental battalions of female prisoners. They faced sexual violence, extortion, and threats of being “zeroed out”

In 2024, the Defense Ministry recruited several hundred volunteers from women’s penal colonies in different regions of Russia for the war, formed them into special battalions, and sent them to pull the wounded out from the line of combat contact, Vyorstka found.

Nothing was officially reported about this project, and all information about it was carefully concealed. But Vyorstka has for the first time managed to find out the details. According to one source, the first batch of women contract soldiers was recruited at the beginning of 2024 without selection or training. According to him, “they quickly got thinned out, offed themselves.”

Training was nevertheless organized for the next intake of convicted women. In the fall of 2024, Defense Ministry recruiters came to the colony in the settlement of Bozoy in Irkutsk Region and offered them contracts. Around New Year 2025, the women were taken out of the colonies.

“The abuse started immediately... The very first battalion commander who came to us said that he could send us to the front line, where people die right away, or keep us at the hospital. But for that, the girls had to come to him at night,” one of the women says.

The convicts told Vyorstka about at least three births and infants who were at first threatened with being sent to an orphanage. After giving birth, the convicts are not demobilized, the women say. They continue serving “under compulsion.”

Vyorstka is telling the story of this project for the first time through dozens of voice messages, documents, correspondence, and testimony from military personnel and their relatives.

Read on Vyorstka’s website what happened in the Defense Ministry’s experimental female battalions (with VPN):

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“They didn’t humiliate me in the colony the way they do in the army”: how the Defense Ministry sends female prisoners to war

Convicted women at the front face sexual violence, extortion, threats of being “zeroed out,” and commanders’ impunity