Russian prisons have emptied by 40 percent in five years. Putin is running out of the cheapest reserve for the front

The director of Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service, Arkady Gostev, on Thursday officially acknowledged for the first time the decline that exiled activist Olga Romanova of the organization Russia Behind Bars has been documenting since the summer of 2022: Russian cells have emptied by 40 percent. Of the 465,000 people in colonies and pretrial detention at the end of 2021, 282,000 remain, nearly a third of whom (85,000) are still awaiting sentencing. Gostev himself admitted to the recruitment of convicts into the army and the growing deployment of prisoners in military production — exile organizations claim that most of the missing passed through precisely these two channels. FSIN workshops produced goods worth 47 billion rubles in 2025, of which 5.5 billion went directly to the army.

Gostev's numbers — and what he didn't say about them

FSIN director Gostev, in an official speech on Thursday, cited three factors behind the decline: the recruitment of convicts into the army, increased use of suspended sentences, and the growing deployment of prisoners in military production. Le Figaro ↗ Of the 197,000 convicted prisoners (after subtracting those under investigation), FSIN this year allocated another 16,000 for the army's needs — either as contract soldiers or as labor for the defense industry. aktuality.sk ↗

The number Gostev didn't mention: how many of those 183,000 missing convicts are dead, how many returned from the front to freedom, and how many are still serving. According to BBC Russian, FSIN concealed the original breakdown as early as autumn 2022 — around the time Wagner began its first recruitment drive in the colonies. BBC Russian ↗

Wagner, Storm-Z, and the road from cell to trench

The mechanism was launched in June 2022 by Yevgeny Prigozhin: Wagner offered convicts a pardon in exchange for a six-month contract at the front. In February 2023, Russia's Ministry of Defense took over the program as the sole recruiter, and in April of that year created the so-called Storm-Z units — assault battalions composed mostly of former prisoners, which Olga Romanova described to RFE/RL as units "sent on suicide missions on the front line." After Prigozhin's death in a plane crash in August 2023, Wagner as a recruitment channel closed for good. RFE/RL ↗

The contract was gradually extended from six to eighteen months. Since January 2025, the Kremlin has abolished one-time signing bonuses for prisoners who sign a contract — at a time when standard signing bonuses for civilian recruits, according to Berlin-based economist Janis Kluge, rose to 1.47 million rubles (roughly $16,000 to $19,000 at the exchange rate). Meanwhile, recruitment bonuses for police officers who bring in a new recruit have increased tenfold — from ten thousand rubles in 2023 to one hundred thousand today (about $1,125). RFE/RL ↗

"About 200,000, about 80 percent lost"

Russia Behind Bars, which Olga Romanova runs from exile, estimates — and Re-Russia adopts her figures — that around 200,000 people were sent from Russian prisons to the front, of whom roughly 50,000 went through Wagner by the summer of 2023, with the rest recruited directly by the Ministry of Defense. Combat losses on the Wagner side were, according to the same organization, 80 percent (killed, wounded and taken out of service, missing, and captured). Ukrainian foreign intelligence puts the figure at 77 percent. None of these numbers has been officially confirmed by the Russian state. Re-Russia.net ↗

According to BBC Russian, at least nine colonies have closed since 2023, including IK-7 in Krasnoyarsk Krai and IK-16 in the village of Gromadsk. In the summer of 2023, the Ministry of Finance proposed closing up to 57 colonies; today, according to BBC, roughly the first third of that number has been closed. Romanova described the current recruitment to BBC as "a slow trickle instead of big waves — because there's no longer anything left to draw from." The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assessed in February 2025 that Moscow has nearly exhausted the prison population as a source of combat-capable manpower. BBC Russian ↗

Echoes of the Soviets: the cell as an arms factory

The part of Gostev's speech that Russian media devoted the least space to was the economic one. In 2025, FSIN produced goods worth 47 billion rubles (roughly half a billion euros) in its workshops, of which 5.5 billion rubles came from production directly for the army — uniforms, drone packaging, assembly of simple components. Gostev noted that the Soviet gulag functioned similarly, but framed the account as a success rather than a shortfall. SITA ↗

In the analytical reading of both Berlin economist Kluge and the exiled Russia Behind Bars, this is an economic substitute for the Kremlin for two parallel shortages. Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of hands have been missing from the military industry due to mobilized soldiers and emigrants — and cells that can no longer be filled also can no longer be staffed more cheaply. The Swiss daily NZZ, in an analysis three days before the May parade, identified five cracks in Russia's wartime superiority. Among them: a fifth drop in recruitment in the first quarter of 2026 and a rise in one-time bonuses for civilian recruits to 1.47 million rubles.

Read also: The front barely moved in spring, recruitment dropped by a fifth, and trust in Putin is falling. Three days before the parade, NZZ sees five cracks in Russia's superiority

The demographic trap and women's cells

The last indicator of where the system now stands is quiet but unpleasant: since spring 2025, recruitment has begun targeting women's colonies, where, according to the exiled magazine Meduza, convicts are offered contracts for medical service near the front line. This is a population the Russian system had never previously touched. Meduza ↗ At the same time, 32,000 former convicts who returned from the front to freedom via Wagner — a figure Prigozhin himself published in June 2023, two months before his death — are, according to the analytical project Re-Russia, beginning to appear in Russian crime reports. Cases of murder, sexual assault, and domestic violence have been recorded, which are investigated with extreme caution because of the amendment to the law on "discrediting the army." Kyiv Independent ↗

In Romanova's and Russia Behind Bars' interpretation, the trajectory is legible: Putin has so far avoided a second wave of mobilization that would threaten his domestic legitimacy, but he is paying with two debts — emptied cells and tens of thousands of returnees whom the system cannot reintegrate. When Putin, ahead of the May parade, closed the windows on bunkers and banned mobile phones among the entourage, he was doing so in an economy where the state is raising not only signing bonuses for recruits but also rewards for police officers who bring in new soldiers.

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