Crime Spike Fears in Russia As Wagner Troops Return Home

Tens of thousands of mercenaries who fought with the Wagner Group in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine have returned home, the private military company's (PMC) founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has said. Their return coincides with the murder rate in Russia rising for the first time in 20 years.

With Wagner troops accused of war crimes and acts of brutality during the conflict, there have been concerns about what impact their return to their home towns in Russia might have. In April, The Guardian reported that convicts had gone back to terrorize their local towns.

Russian authorities allowed Wagner to recruit prisoners from jails in which convicts were pardoned in exchange for military service. Prigozhin said in January that he would stop drafting prisoners, who could get their freedom after completing a six-month tour.

Prigozhin said on Sunday that as many as 32,000 former prisoners had returned home after their contracts with the PMC had finished, insisting that the rate of crimes committed after they were demobbed was lower that that of other former convicts.

"People released from prison during the same period without a Wagner PMC contract committed 80 times more crimes," Prigozhin said in the audio message published by his press service.

The war is said to have had an impact on crime in Russian society in general. The business newspaper Kommersant reported in March that there had been a rise in cases of murder and attempted murder last year for the first time in two decades, which has been linked to the general climate created by the invasion, although it did not refer to Wagner directly.

Following 20 years of steady decline, the number of such cases rose by 4 percent, from 7,332 in 2021 to 7,628 in 2022, registered by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office.

Prigozhin has repeatedly criticized the Russian defense establishment, which he accused of not providing enough ammunition for his forces that have played a key role in the fight for the Donetsk town of Bakhmut.

The Wagner founder said in May that around 10,000 prisoners, or one fifth of the convicts recruited by the PMC had been killed in battle.

This was at odds with a claim earlier in the year by Ukrainian presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, who said that nearly four-fifths of Russian prisoners recruited by Wagner had been killed, injured, or captured.

Prisoner's rights activist Olga Romanova told The Moscow Times in April that Wagner had recruited around 49,000 convicts and around 30,000 had been killed, suggesting that Prigozhin's latest claim that 32,000 had returned home was an exaggeration.

Newsweek has contacted Romanova and the Russian Defense Ministry for comment.

It comes as President Vladimir Putin last week confirmed reports that he had pardoned Russian convicts who signed up to fight with the mercenary group.

The Russian Defense Ministry took over prisoner recruitment at the start of the year, and had recruited around 10,000 people between February and April 2023.