Russia is sending female prison inmates to work in occupied regions of eastern Ukraine, a Russian rights activist said.
The comments on March 13 by Olga Romanova, the head of a Russian prisoner advocacy organization, corroborate other reports from Ukrainian military officials who have also reported female inmates showing up in parts of Ukraine.
The Russian government has not commented on the reports.
The use of prison convicts by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine -- now in its 13th month -- has been well-documented. Many of the soldiers fighting for the Wagner private mercenary company are inmates who were offered amnesty or reduced sentences in exchange for agreeing to fight in Ukraine.
Wagner says it stopped recruiting inmates last month, while the Defense Ministry has itself reportedly begun its own recruiting campaign in Russian prisons.
But the extent to which female inmates were being sent to Ukraine is still unclear, and what exactly they are being sent to do.
On March 13, Ukraine’s General Staff said in its daily update that a train with prison inmates had been spotted in the Donetsk region. One of the train cars was designated for women, it said.
In comments to the investigative news site IStories, Romanova said she heard about such measures late last year, with female inmates being taken from prison facilities in southern Russia. About 100 women in all were sent to Ukraine, she was quoted as saying.
Romanova earlier said that the Russian Defense Ministry's recruiting of inmates was taking place in at least two prison facilities – in the central Volgograd and southern Kemerovo regions. It’s unclear if those inmates are mainly men or include some women.
In December, Wagner’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, released a letter addressed to him from a regional lawmaker in the central Sverdlovsk region. The lawmaker said a group of female inmates had asked to be sent to Ukraine to work as medics or signal workers -- for trains or other needs.
The letter has not been confirmed.
Western officials have said that the Wagner Group has used prison inmates in its ongoing campaign to take the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
Ukrainian soldiers have reported encountering waves of head-on infantry assaults on their positions, and Western officials have said tens of thousands of prison inmates may have been killed in the Russian effort.