17,000 People Have 'Disappeared' from Prisons in 35 Regions of Russia During the Ukrainian War

17,000 people have 'disappeared' from prisons in 35 regions of Russia during the Ukrainian war. This is reported by Mediazona, referencing data from the websites of territorial divisions of the Federal Penitentiary Service.

'Neither the Federal Penitentiary Service, nor Prigozhin, nor the Ministry of Defense have released official data on the number of prisoners recruited for the war. The scale of recruitment could be assessed based on the statistics of the prisoner population, but the Federal Penitentiary Service stopped publishing this information,' the report states.

The media emphasizes that at the beginning of 2023, the number of prisoners in these regions decreased by a total of 17,000. Specifically, most of the prisoners who have 'disappeared' are from the Samara (2,723), Chelyabinsk (1,574), and Kirov (1,153) regions, as well as Tatarstan (1,040).

In the Samara region's prisons, there were 10,200 individuals at the beginning of 2022, but by the beginning of 2023, this number fell to just 7,500. Such a decline cannot be explained by historical trends, as the number of prisoners in the region actually grew by over 300 individuals throughout 2021.

The publication reports that the collected data is incomplete and also notes that it is unclear what caused a significant increase in the number of prisoners in the Smolensk region and Crimea, as there have been no news of new prisons in those areas.

A source from one of the colonies in the Tula region stated that about a thousand people have been recruited from colonies across the region for the front. According to him, this number was provided to them by employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service. Statistics confirm this as well—at the beginning of 2022, there were 6,400 individuals in Tula region colonies, and by the beginning of 2023, this number had decreased by 875 to 5,500.

At the same time, in several regions, the figures published by the Federal Penitentiary Service do not align with the accounts of prisoners.