Russians accused of crimes were offered a choice

On March 28, police arrived at Andrey Perlov's house near Novosibirsk in Siberia at around 6:45 a.m.

They accused him of stealing about three million rubles ($32,000; £24,000) from a Novosibirsk football club where he was managing director – something he and his family deny.

The 62-year-old Perlov is an Olympic champion and won the 50 km race in 1992.

He has been detained for more than six months and his family says he is being pressured to agree to fight in Ukraine. He was told that in return the embezzlement case against him would be frozen and possibly dropped if the war ended.

It is no secret that prisoners have been recruited to fight in Ukraine, but the BBC's analysis can show how the initial focus has shifted to convicted criminals to now include people still awaiting trial.

The latest laws mean that both prosecutors and defense attorneys are now legally required to inform people accused of most crimes that they have the option of going to war instead of going to court.

The law, passed in March 2024, stipulates that if they sign, law enforcement and any investigation will stop. Their cases are usually fully closed after the war ends.

“This has turned the Russian criminal justice system on its head,” said Olga Romanova, the director of Russia Behind Bars, an NGO that provides legal assistance to prisoners.

“Police can now catch a man over the body of a person he just killed. They tighten the handcuffs and then the murderer says, 'Oh wait, I want to take part in a special military operation,' and they close the criminal case.”

We obtained a leaked recording of an investigator describing the benefits of signing a contract with the Russian army to someone whose husband had already been sentenced to three years in prison for theft.

“He can get six more for this other crime,” he tells her. “I offered him the opportunity to sign an agreement. If his request is granted, he will go to war and we will close the case.”

If the defendant signs, the criminal case will be dropped within a few days and he will go to the front almost immediately.

Three lawyers working in Russia confirmed that this has become the norm across the country.

Some sign up in hopes of avoiding jail and a criminal record – but it's not an easy way out, as teenager Jaroslaw Lipawski found out.

He signed a contract with the army after he was accused of intentionally “causing serious damage to the health of a group of people after prior consultation.”

His young girlfriend had just found out she was pregnant, and to avoid prosecution, Lipavsky enlisted in the military at the age of 18.

He traveled to Ukraine and was dead a week later – one of the youngest soldiers to die in the war.

It is not clear how many people accused of crimes have chosen to fight rather than face trial, but this policy shift reflects Russia's need to bolster its troops while minimizing the number of other civilians that it needs to mobilize.

“Do Russians care about convicts or those in prison? “I suspect that’s not the case,” said Michael Koffman, a military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He believes the government “probably assumes that these are people it can lose, that no one will miss them and that they will not have a significant negative impact on the overall economy.”

When the Wagner mercenary group first recruited prison inmates, its late leader Yevgeny Prigozhin targeted convicts in maximum-security prisons, saying he needed their “criminal talents” in return for pardons.

The BBC and Russian website Mediazona have viewed and reviewed confidential documents that shed light on the process of recruiting prisoners, what happened to many of them and the need to maintain the flow of new fighters.

From analyzing the dog tags of convicts who died in Ukraine and payments to their families, we know that Wagner recruited almost 50,000 prisoners from penal colonies and at times lost up to 200 in action each day. Many others were injured.

All prisoners' identification tags begin with the letter K, which stands for “Kolonya” or prison colony.

The first three numbers identify the prison they came from and the last three numbers identify the recruit, which are awarded in order. The higher the number, the more recruits came from that colony.

Payment records show that between July 2022 and June 2023 alone, more than 17,000 prisoners were killed in an attempt to take the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.

To make up for the losses, Wagner and later the Defense Department adjusted their recruiting strategies to expand the pool of people they could draw on.

Some defendants oppose the new agreement because they oppose the war in principle, others because the risk of death or injury on the battlefield is too great, and still others because they want to stay home and argue their case .

But they could come under enormous pressure from the authorities, says Andrey Perlov's daughter Alina.

“He refused and we made a big splash in the local media so he was sent to the strict punishment cell where he was handed the contract again.”

She adds that when he refused a second time, he was banned from seeing or calling his family.

They still hope to prove his innocence, but when Alina last saw her father in court in mid-July, he had lost a lot of weight. “He’s trying to stay happy,” she says, “but if this continues, they’ll destroy him.”

We interviewed the Russian authorities about the Andrey Perlov case and asked whether they were unfairly pressuring prisoners to join the army. They didn't answer.