Two prisons will be abolished in the Russian Krasnoyarsk region, the convicts are fighting in Ukraine

Denisov informed the MP about his activities in the past year. He said that the number of complaints about the functioning of correctional facilities decreased by exactly a quarter last year compared to 2022. He admitted that this is because there are fewer prisoners and that some prisons will have to be closed because of this.

“A one-time significant reduction in the number of convicts in a situation of a special military operation led to the need to inform higher-ranking officials about the need to close prisons for savings,” said Denisov. The invasion of Ukraine, which the Russian army launched in February 2022 at the behest of President Vladimir Putin, is referred to as a special military operation in Russia.

In the Krasnoyarsk region, the penal colony in the village of Gromadsk, east of Krasnoyarsk, where previously convicted men are imprisoned, will be closed. In the village of Arejskoye, west of Krasnoyarsk, a correctional facility with a strict regime for men convicted for the first time will be abolished. The Insider writes that journalist Ivan Safronov, convicted of treason, was held in Arejskoye for several months. The prosecutor’s office accused him of collaborating with Czech intelligence.

According to Denisov, the closing of prisons is a temporary phenomenon and in the future they will need to be opened again. “The war will end sooner or later. Everything will return to normal because the social structure of society has not changed,” the ombudsman said.

Russia began hiring those condemned to war in Ukraine already in the first months of the invasion. It was first dealt with by the mercenary Wagner group of Yevgeny Prigozhin. The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, on Tuesday approved the final third reading of a bill that changes the non-conditional sentence to a conditional sentence for offenders who contracted with the Russian military during the war against Ukraine.

At the end of last year, the American magazine Newsweek wrote, citing unofficial data, that Russia had recruited 100,000 convicts for the war against Ukraine.