Putin Crony Says He’ll Send Female Prison Inmates to War
“There is resistance, but I think we’ll wear [them] down.”

Mikhail Svetlov
Russia’s king troll and shadow army boss Yevgeny Prigozhin says he’s all for deploying female prison inmates in the war against Ukraine—in fact, he’s already working on it. The Wagner Group boss revealed as much in a statement published by the press service of his Concord Management on Wednesday. In response to a proposal from a Sverdlovsk region lawmaker to use women from a penal colony there as “comms operators, doctors, and nurses,” Prigozhin said they could also be deployed as snipers. “Not only nurses and comms operators, but also in sabotage groups and sniper pairs. Everyone knows that this has been widely used. We are working to this end. There is resistance, but I think we will wear [them] down,” he said. It wasn’t immediately clear where the “resistance” was coming from. Prigozhin, previously widely known as the sanctioned Putin ally accused of having his internet trolls interfere in U.S. elections, saw his public profile rise in the war as his Wagner Group began recruiting thousands of prison inmates to support Russia’s army in Ukraine.
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