Russian President Vladimir Putin has personally pardoned convicts recruited by the mercenary Wagner Group to ship them off to the Ukraine war, journalist Andrey Zakharov discovered after gaining access to the police service database (IBD-F).
The database is updated with information about committed crimes, date of sentencing, location of serving prison time, and release date.
“I asked a person who has access to IBD-F to check a few convicts featured in [Wagner Group financier Yevgeny] Prigozhin as an example of the Wagner Group’s social elevator: in prison the day before yesterday, on the frontlines yesterday, and free today. One is a killer, the other one is a bandit in outdated terms. Both have the same mark in IBD-F: ‘Released from serving his sentence based on the president’s pardon decree’,” Zakharov noted.
The decrees are dated by 6 July 2022.
This document is not publicly available, the nearest open source decrees are dated by 5 and 8 July. Zakharov writes that the document numbers suggest that five decrees between them have been classified.
“When Prigozhin recruits convicts, he promises them a pardon in six months (while legally it seems to be issued before they are sent to the frontlines). One of the people I asked to be looked up made it back to the civilian world earlier than expected because he lost a leg at the war. The other was filmed by the Prigozhin media in early January, six months later exactly,” the journalist stressed.
Andrey Medvedev, a former Wagner Group commander who fled to Norway, earlier told The Insider that convicts recruited by the mercenary company write a pardon plea before they are sent to the Ukraine war.
In late January, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told BBC News Russian that the presidential pardon decrees for convicts who are dispatched to the Ukraine war are classified.
“You know that there are public decrees and there are confidential ones. Therefore, I cannot say anything about these decrees,” Peskov said. “But I can confirm that the pardon procedure is carried out in strict adherence to the Russian law.”
Eva Merkacheva, a member of the Russian Human Rights Council, earlier said that convicts are formally pardoned before they leave prisons to fight in the Ukraine war. She also said that the pardon procedure constitutes a state secret.
