• Convicts are promised freedom and wealth in small jail cells.
• Over the course of a month-long investigation, CNN spoke with prisoners involved in Russia’s most recent recruitment effort as well as their friends and family members.
• Activists assert that hundreds have been contacted in numerous jails throughout Russia, including those housing murderers and drug criminals.

Convicts are promised freedom and wealth in small jail cells. There are frantic phone conversations between family members and prisoners considering the offer. After that, inmates disappear, leaving loved ones to sort through stories of injured people showing up at hospitals.

In prison communities all around Russia, this scene is currently taking place. There is mounting evidence that the Kremlin is choosing nasty battles and enlisting Russia’s inmates in its ugly war because its regular army is overstretched after nearly six months of a brutal and poorly planned invasion of Ukraine.

Over the course of a month-long investigation, CNN spoke with prisoners involved in Russia’s most recent recruitment effort as well as their friends and family members. Activists assert that hundreds have been contacted in numerous jails throughout Russia, including those housing murderers and drug criminals. Some have even been removed from the jail where Paul Whelan, a well-known American who is imprisoned in Russia, is being housed. In a statement in July, his brother David claimed to have learned that ten volunteers had left IK17 in Mordovia for the front lines in Ukraine.

An investigation of dozens of family chat conversations reveals the alluring benefits given to fighting in Ukraine, where the likelihood of death is high. According to the most recent Western estimates, since the invasion started, up to 75,000 Russian soldiers have died or been injured (a claim the Kremlin has denied).

A cat crawled across bunk beds while one prisoner spoke to CNN from his small cell, and a fan mounted atop an old television sought to cool the air between highly barred windows. He described the conditions on the condition of anonymity while using a contraband smartphone, which is quite common in Russia’s prison system. He was imprisoned for several years for drug offenses.

He stated, “They won’t tolerate rapists, pedophiles, radicals, or terrorists, but they would welcome murders.” “The choice is between amnesty and a pardon in six months. Someone mentions earning 100,000 and 200,000 rubles per month. Everything has changed.” According to him, the offer was made when unidentified men suspected to be representatives of a company that provides private military contractors visited the prison in the first half of July. If accepted, the program would involve two weeks of training in the southern Russian region of Rostov. Despite his two years of military service, he claimed that the recruiters did not seem to require it.