In Russia, Pardoned Former Convicts Return Home From War

Some of Dmitri Malyshev’s acquaintances from the village of Rakhina, near Volgograd, probably first learned that he was home from the war in Ukraine from social media. In September 2024, he posted a picture of himself reclining, with a drink in his hand, wearing sunglasses that showed the reflection of a nearby swimming pool. Malyshev had been wounded at the front—a broken jaw, ruptured ear drum, and some shrapnel in one of his hands—and had therefore been sent home to recover.

“Yes, he [Dmitry Malyshev] returned due to an injury,” the head of the Rakhina rural settlement told v1.ru, a Russian news site for the Volgograd region. “The day before yesterday I saw him in the store and greeted him. As he told me, he will be treated here and will go back to the SVO zone”—that is, the zone of the “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Dmitri Malyshev is a cannibal. In 2015, Malyshev was convicted of murdering an acquaintance after the other man propositioned him for sex. Malyshev beat his friend with a crowbar and then filmed himself frying the man’s heart on the stove with onions, eating it, and trying to feed the table scraps to his pet cat. When asked why he had done this, he cheerfully told v1.ru, “You’d have to ask drunk me from ten years ago. I don’t understand drunk Dima either!”

This was not Malyshev’s first murder—he was also charged with a double homicide from 2013. But in May 2024, having served a little under 10 years of his 25-year sentence for murder and cannibalism, Malyshev was released from prison to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since then, v1.ru has been regularly reporting on his movements—reflecting, perhaps, a certain amount of anxiety about the potential of unexpectedly running into a convicted cannibal at a local store.

After his month in Volgograd last September, Malyshev recovered and was sent back to the front, where he currently fights in the Storm-V prisoner battalion. He is one of thousands of Russian prisoners who have been recruited to fight in Ukraine, where his chances of survival are low. However, Malyshev represents a fundamental problem for the Russian government. At some point, if he gets very lucky, Malyshev, and other prisoner-soldiers like him, could come back to Russia for good. The return of these pardoned former convicts from the front has made the war visible at home—occasionally in the person of a cannibal sitting by the pool.

A range of strategies, including the recruitment of prisoners, has often obscured the war from those in Russia with the most social, economic, and political power. According to a public opinion poll from September 2024, only about 30 percent of Russians know someone directly who has fought in the war in Ukraine, compared to 80 percent of Ukrainians who know someone who has been killed or wounded. The cost of the war is being borne by a small fragment of the Russian population—and that fragment tends to be poorer, less educated, more rural, often not ethically Russian, and sometimes in possession of a criminal record.

For other Russians—residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, for example, who have more social capital and whose opposition to the war could pose a problem for the regime—the war is less visible. Its effects are less apparent in daily life, and it is easier for them to simply shut their eyes and ignore it. That is how the Russian government would like it to stay. But, when it comes to the use of prisoners in war, this strategy has sometimes backfired as residents are faced with the return of convicts to their communities.

Russia has tended to rely on its numerical advantage in Ukraine, requiring large numbers of expendable troops. During the most recent offensive, the Russian military attempted to use small groups of mobile Russian troops to try to push through at points along the front where the Ukrainian military is stretched thin. Occasionally they succeed, as they briefly did near the town of Dobropillya, close to the city of Pokrovsk, shortly before the summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. (The breakthrough near Dobropillya seems to have since been contained.)

These missions are often one-way tickets for Russian soldiers, whose main purpose is to be cannon fodder. As one Ukrainian soldier told El Pais, “It’s like drop after drop of water falling on a stone until it makes a hole.” Or as a Ukrainian officer told RFE/RL, “We keep killing them, and they keep sending them. … It’s like the tactics ants use. They know there’s sugar there, and they all start heading there.” To maintain this approach, the Russian military needs a constant stream of new recruits to replace its losses, soldiers whose lives can be treated cheaply.

But the Russian government has so far tried to avoid a general mobilization. The partial mobilization Putin announced in 2022 led to widespread opposition, with significant protests and a mass exodus of military-aged men from Russia. Since then, the Russian government has employed a program of coercive measures and financial incentives to recruit instead, relying on a supply of vulnerable people to replenish its forces in Ukraine. That has meant using foreign troops, including North Koreans, and offering volunteers large signing bonuses, high monthly salaries, and substantial death payments, which are enticing to Russia’s poor. It has also meant the recruitment of prisoners.

It’s hard to say exactly how many prisoners have been recruited to fight in Ukraine, though the numbers are high. One Russian prisoners’ rights group has estimated at least 150,000 prisoners have been recruited, though some dispute this. In 2023, a joint project between the BBC and the Russian dissident outlet Mediazona showed that, since the beginning of the war, the average Russian casualty in Ukraine had gone from a 21-year-old professional soldier to a 34-year-old former prisoner—although data suggests that the percentage of Russian casualties that are prisoners has declined recently from one-third of total casualties to around 18 percent.

Prisoners have tended to be used as expendable troops, and have been sent to the most brutal fighting along the front, particularly in the Wagner Group’s offensive in Bakhmut. This strategy likely reflects the government’s view of prisoners as an especially marginal and vulnerable population. “Do Russians care about convicts or those who are in prison? I suspect that they don’t,” Michael Kofman, military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the BBC. He said that the Russian government “likely assumes that these are people they can lose, that nobody will miss them and that they will not have a substantial, negative effect on the overall economy.” Yana Gelmel, a Russian prison rights activist, told the New York Times, “It suits the state to continue taking these men, because they don’t exist in the eyes of society.”

The recruitment of prisoners to fight in Ukraine began as a Wagner initiative in 2022, soon after the full-scale invasion, with tacit approval from the Ministry of Defense. Representatives of Wagner showed up at prisons across the country with an offer: six months serving with Wagner at the front, in the midst of the worst of the fighting, before returning home with a pardon—that is, if you survive. If not, you’re buried as a hero instead of a convict. “As for verification and guarantees,” says a man who appears to be Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin himself, in a leaked video of the recruitment process at a penal colony in the Mari El Republic, “There are two who can get you out of prison alive: Allah and God. I take you out alive, but I don’t always bring you back alive.”

Analysis from the BBC and Mediazona suggests that in 2022, Wagner was able to recruit around 50,000 troops from prisoners. These troops, along with the rest of Wagner, were sent to the most violent parts of the front, including in Bakhmut, where many of them died. According to the BBC, at certain points, 200 former convicts may have been dying per day.

But some survived. And while a few pardons were not ultimately honored, six (or more) months later, some of those convicts started to return home.

Most of these men did not go on to commit more crimes. Some of them had not been violent offenders in the first place, and others turned over a new leaf. A former hitman of the Tsapka gang, for example, returned home to Krasnodar in the summer of 2023, and is now working as a driver, without incident.

However, not all returning convicts have taken this path, and the conditions of their reintegration into society—after months of brutal fighting and with little social or mental health support—are hardly conducive to preventing further acts of violence. Data from the Russian Supreme Court shows that crimes perpetrated by current and former members of the military quadrupled from 2021 through 2023. According to the independent Russian news publication Verstka, as of February 2025, returning veterans have committed at least 750 severe violent crimes, resulting in 378 deaths and 376 severe injuries—though these statistics include crimes committed by veterans with and without prior criminal records.

In the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, crime fell dramatically, as so many young men left to join the military. This trend is now reversing. Crimes of poverty, including economic crimes like theft and robbery, have declined in Russia’s poorest regions, most dramatically in regions with high recruitment—apparently as a result of the massive influx of cash from war volunteers and death payments to widows. But in 2024, violent crimes, and crimes considered “especially grave,” have increased by as much as 10 percent—and are at their highest peak since 2011. According to Verstka, Moscow is one of the regions where this increase has been most dramatic, where, along with other wealthy urban centers, the war has otherwise been made mostly invisible.

Pardoned Wagner soldiers have sometimes gone on to commit repeat offenses, similar to the crimes for which they had been pardoned. As Verstka also reported, out of 202 pardoned and conditionally released veterans who had gone on to kill or maim, 89 had a previous criminal record for similar crimes. Some of these repeat crimes include continuations or escalations of previous patterns of violence against women, including a man in Perm who had been pardoned for a previous conviction for rape before returning home to murder another woman; or a man in Saratov, who murdered his wife in 2020 for attempting to divorce him, received a pardon for joining Wagner in 2022, and returned home from the war to murder his new girlfriend in 2024 when she tried to break up with him.

Stories of pardoned veterans returning from the war to commit new crimes have frequently made local and national news in Russia. Incidents including the murder of a 12-year-old girl in Kemerovo by a pardoned Wagner veteran, or a fire at a night club in Kostroma that killed 13 people—set by a soldier who then signed another contract, and was released from pretrial detention to return to the war—have been headline news even in state media channels. According to Meduza, journalists in Russia have since been warned not to continue discussing crimes by veterans of the war in Ukraine. However, these stories continue to circulate in the independent Russophone press and on Telegram.

Pardoned convicts have been involved in some of the most shocking and sensational incidents. Some of these incidents occurred in major urban centers where war recruitment has otherwise been less visible. For example, Ilya Metlitsky from St. Petersburg had been convicted for the brutal murder of a woman he claimed was his girlfriend—but whom he may have just been stalking—in 2019. In 2022, he joined Wagner and was pardoned. In May 2023, he returned home. In 2024, he met a woman named Ekaterina and started sending her gifts and frequent messages on Telegram. After learning about Metlitsky’s previous murder conviction, Ekaterina stopped talking to him, and Metlitsky began stalking her. On Dec. 4, 2024, Metlitsky blocked her exit from her street with his car, smashed in her windshield, and attempted to stab her with a needle containing an unknown substance that appeared to be blood.

Victims of these crimes frequently report a sense that veterans of the war have become largely untouchable and cannot be held accountable for acts of potential violence. Ivan Rossomakhin, a 28-year-old man from the village of Novy Burets in the Kirov region, was recruited for the front from prison, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for murder in 2020. When he returned home with a pardon in March 2023, he began to terrorize his village, drunkenly wandering around town, making threats, and waving an axe, while claiming he couldn’t be charged with anything due to his status as a veteran. The village of Novy Burets organized a town hall to demand that police take action against Rossomakhin. The next day, Rossomakhin broke into the home of one of the organizers of the town hall—an 85-year-old woman named Yulia Buiskich—and murdered her with an axe. Her relatives described being afraid of state reprisals for publicly criticizing a veteran of the war in Ukraine under a new law against disparaging the Russian military that can carry a 15-year penalty.

Some veterans seem to revel in this sense of their own untouchability. For example, the BBC describes police arriving after a man attacked a woman on the street, only to have the assailant present documents proving that he was a veteran, and saying that “because of his service ‘nothing will happen to him.’” As one police officer told Novaya Gazeta, “Four years ago, I put him away for seven years. … And here he is in front of me again, saying: ‘You won’t be able to do anything, officer. Now’s our time, the time of those who are shedding blood in the special military operation.’”

Judges in Russia now frequently consider participation in the war in Ukraine as a “mitigating circumstance,” leading to reduced sentences. In Nizhny Novgorod, a Wagner returnee beat his girlfriend unconscious, causing a traumatic brain injury and severe facial fractures—and as a result of the “mitigating circumstance” of his participation in the war, was given only two years of probation for the crime. Since his conviction, he has been invited to speak at elementary schools about “about the need to serve in the army, about love, about the Motherland, about the performance of official duty to his people.”

Further, returning to the war gives those accused of violent crimes an out as they are being processed by the justice system. It is possible to void a conviction or get a pending case dropped by signing a contract to go to the front. The independent Russian outlet iStories reports that prosecutors hope to recruit 40 percent of defendants in criminal trials to serve in the military. This option is also available to repeat offenders who have already served. In the case of Ilya Metlitsky, the St. Petersburg man who tried to stab a woman with a needle, a judge mitigated Metlitsky’s sentence as a result of his participation in the war, and he was charged with a misdemeanor. He received only probation and a fine—with the agreement that Metlitsky would sign another contract to return to the front. After his arrest for the murder of Yulia Buiskich, Ivan Rossomakhin quickly volunteered to go to the front again, and prosecutors dropped the case against him. As the director of Russia Behind Bars, Olga Romanova, told the BBC, “This has turned Russia’s law enforcement system upside down. … Police can now catch a man over a corpse of someone he has just killed. They tighten the handcuffs and then the killer says: ‘Oh wait, I want to go on a special military operation,’ and they close the criminal case.”

While the original aim of prisoner recruitment was to make the war less visible, these high-profile violent crimes have soured the public on this strategy and have contributed to a sense of widespread societal breakdown and criminality. Anna Pekaryova, the granddaughter of Yulia Buiskich, told the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t feel safe. Thousands of criminals are walking our streets.” Residents of Novy Burets, where Buiskich was murdered, have taken to carrying knives and pepper spray out of fear that Rossomakhin will unexpectedly reappear in the town, having been wounded or released from fighting.

This potential disorder at home could be particularly dangerous for Putin, whose legitimacy comes from the widespread perception that he brought order to Russia after the violent and chaotic 1990s. In 2023, Putin responded dismissively to concern about prisoner battalions, saying that “the negative consequences are minimal” and the recidivism rate of convict soldiers has been low.

Nevertheless, it does appear that negative responses to the return of convict soldiers has changed how the recruitment of prisoners operates. The Ministry of Defense took over the recruitment of prisoners from Wagner in February 2023, which became one of the sources of tension between Wagner and the government. After Prigozhin’s march on Moscow and his subsequent spontaneous aerial combustion, the recruitment of prisoners by the ministry became much more extensive, though it has since decreased as the population of prisoners has been depleted. In 2023, the Duma passed a law to make the practice of recruiting prisoners official, while significantly changing the functioning of the agreement between the state and convict recruits.

Some of these changes allow the state to avoid some of the awkward press that recruitment had previously created. Prisoners charged with certain crimes—specifically sexual crimes involving minors and terrorism—are barred from volunteering. Prisoners no longer receive pardons signed by Putin, preventing a repeat of headlines such as “PUTIN PARDONED A SATANIST-CANNIBAL.” (This does not refer to Malyshev but to an entirely different cannibal, one of three pardoned by Putin.) Prisoners are granted—at the end of their service, upon receiving a medal or upon being wounded, or at the hypothetical conclusion of the war—a conditional release from prison. Prisoners are also now regular soldiers, with official status in the military and veterans benefits or death payments. Some prisoners are distributed to regular battalions, but most of them are sent to the penal battalion, now renamed Storm-V rather than Storm-Z.

Prisoners are no longer able to leave the front after six months if they survive. Instead, they are placed on 18-month contracts that are renewed automatically, and they will not be released until the end of the war under the partial mobilization decree. This helps mitigate the current rise of violent crime within Russia as pardoned Wagner recruits steadily come home, but it creates the potential for a large outburst of violence at the end of the war once prisoners return en masse. In sum—the Russian government seems to know it has a problem. The army’s solution seems to be trying to get as many of these soldiers killed in the war as possible.

From a messaging standpoint, since taking over the recruitment of prisoners from Wagner the Russian government has presented the act of volunteering to convicts as a form of redemptive sacrifice, rather than as a way for them to get out of prison. In response to outreach from the parents of a woman whose murderer was pardoned in 2023, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described military service as a form of pardoning where convicts “atone for their crime on the battlefield. They are redeemed with blood in assault brigades, under bullets, under shells.” Likewise, when the Duma formalized prisoner recruitment, one member had comforting words for a female deputy who had been concerned that the law would functionally legalize rape. “We are not releasing them to a resort,” said the deputy supporting the law. “They will not go under contract as cooks, but in the assault units, where they will really atone for their guilt.” He explained that the percentage of convicts who would survive to return would be “very, very small. You don’t have to be afraid of it.”

Prisoner recruits seem to echo this sentiment, and some of them seem aware of their probable fate. As one former convict told the New York Times, one of the reasons he had volunteered was the high value of the compensation promised to his family in the event of his death. “‘I didn’t want to be such a bad person in the eyes of the children in our village,’ he said. ‘I would be remembered not as a convict, but as a man who died in a war.’” Many recruits are less happy knowing they are being sent to their deaths. Another convict quoted by the Times said of his commanders, “We are not human to them, because we are criminals.”

But not all of these men will die. Depending on the course of the war and the pace of continued recruitment, at some point, some of them will be released after the end of the war and will expect to be pardoned—whether that is in two weeks, as Donald Trump has promised, or two decades. These men will have been brutalized by years of combat, and they may come home with new resentments against a government that has long tried to kill them. While many may go on to live peaceful lives, evidence from the past few years suggests that others may not.

Looking to the past, Russia experienced a similar surge in crime after the Soviet-Afghan War and the war in Chechnya, as returning veterans bitter over a lack of government support became involved in organized crime. This was an immensely destabilizing force in the Russia of the 1990s and is remembered with intense negativity. The scale of the war in Ukraine is far larger than the war in Afghanistan, and there will be many more veterans returning, even given the scale of current Russian casualties. The resulting disorder could be greater, too, depending on the condition of the Russian state when the war comes to an end.

The Russian government has created a time bomb for itself. Either all of these men must die, or the mobilization must go on forever—otherwise, someday, the war will come home.