Fight in Ukraine and we’ll drop charges: Kremlin

The decision follows the recruitment of convicts and is aimed at shoring up the country’s armed forces amid mounting losses.

Vladimir Putin meets mothers of Russian troops in Ukraine. Picture: AFP

President Vladimir Putin has signed a bill allowing defendants to avoid prosecution if they agree to go to war in Ukraine.

The decision follows the recruitment of convicts and is aimed at shoring up the country’s armed forces amid mounting losses as the government struggles to attract volunteers to fight.

Those on trial even for grave crimes will be able to appeal to the court and have the charges against them dropped if they sign a contract with the defence ministry to join Russia’s forces in Ukraine. The bill was signed into law late on Wednesday.

A Russian investigative media outlet, iStories, quoting unnamed military sources, reported that the country’s 200 pre-trial detention centres are each expected to contribute 100 people for the war, potentially generating 20,000 soldiers for the armed forces.

Andrei Kartapolov, head of the Duma defence committee, who pushed the bill through parliament, described the legislation as a way to allow criminals repay their debt to society.

“The person is essentially repenting for their crime,” he said, evoking Russia’s practice of recruiting convicts in the early years of the Second World War.

The law does not list the crimes that will not be pardoned; MPs who drafted the bill said the decision would be up to the judge in each case. Similar bills in the past have excepted convictions for treason, spying, terrorism or child sex offences.

Legal experts have complained that the bill undermines the principle of punishment in criminal justice. “You have to be really desperate to do it, or you have to display sheer legal nihilism and an utter lack of understanding of how the law works and why we need it,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin, said on her YouTube channel. “This is a daring legal experiment. No society can carry on like this — it cannot encourage crime and murder.”

Russia began tapping its vast prison population for recruits in the summer of 2022 after the professional army took heavy casualties in the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, and has struggled to find volunteers willing to fight and die there since.

A brief, partial mobilisation in the autumn of 2022 spooked hundreds of thousands of Russian men — most of them educated, white-collar workers— into fleeing the country. The new law could be an attempt to avoid another mobilisation.

Some Russian pro-war bloggers said it offered the only solution to the manpower shortage.

“The front line and offensive ops are not much of a holiday retreat, and the chances for the convicts to get killed are very high,” Kirill Fyodorov wrote on his popular Telegram channel.

“Are you willing for your son, brother or husband to stand in for them while storming open areas littered with mines?”

There have been reports that suspects or convicts in high-profile crimes have already had their charges dropped or been released from prison after they asked to be sent to Ukraine.

Twenty-six suspects involved in a shoot-out last month at the offices of the e-commerce giant Wildberries, 300m from the Kremlin in Moscow, have petitioned to go to Ukraine in exchange for having charges dropped.

THE TIMES