July 28, 2024: Since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Russian prisons descended into chaos. Problems included a shortage of guards and overcrowding. The overcrowding was caused by the large number of Russians imprisoned for opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most of the new prisoners were political, not criminal and many were Moslems from Russian Central Asian provinces who opposed being mobilized as infantry for the war in Ukraine. Many of these political prisoners were able to organize prisoners to protest poor living conditions, false imprisonment, etc., and demand improvements. This led to a growing number of prison uprisings, some of them including prisoners taking guards and threatening to kill guards if their demands were not met. In one hostage situation the government sent in OMON, which is a force of riot police trained to use non-lethal or lethal force when recovering hostages. On June 16, 2024, six Moslem prisoners seized a senior prison official and a guard and demanded they be released from prison. That never works and OMON was sent in and released the two hostages and killed the six prisoners who were holding the two prison guards hostage.

What was unusual about this incident was that it involved militant Moslem prisoners that the Russians promptly classified as dangerous terrorists. The prisons were once dominated by criminals of one kind or another. But now the influx of ethnic Ukrainians arrested for being Ukrainian (many of them residents of Ukraine conquered by the Russians since 2022), and Moslems suspected of being Islamic terrorists, has tuned many usually docile prisoners into violence prone enemies of the state. The more the government cracks down, the more widespread and violent the prison population becomes. To make matters worse the government tried to suppress information of what was going on in prisons from reaching the public. This lack of information made friends, families and associates of the prisoners angry and believing the worst about what happened to people they knew who were imprisoned.

The government fears that the prisoner unrest could spread and, as it has done a few times in the past, get out of control. Sending in OMON often makes things worse and there are only about 20,000 OMON personnel in a nation of 140 million. A widespread uprising would be more than OMON, prison guards or local police could handle. Calling in the army is a bad idea because the heavy losses in Ukraine have left the army short of troops and more and more military age Russian men are actively avoiding being mobilized into military service. Many are arrested and jailed for trying to avoid service in Ukraine. Ukrainian soldiers captured in the war have been added to the prison population so these prisoners don’t have to be treated as prisoners of war. Efforts to mobilize more Russian men to fight Russian and Ukrainian prisoners protesting abusive prison conditions only generate more violence and trouble the prison systems cannot handle.

The lethal combination of more prisoners, especially Moslems, fewer ethnic Russians and fewer guards to confront an increasingly angry and politicized situation is spreading as the government seeks to pretend it isn’t happening and everything is under control. The overwhelmed prison guards, who were always corrupt, are now even more eager to make deals with prisoners in order to survive. In the past guards would reward criminal prisoners who would help control, often with violence, political prisoners. Many of the criminals were mobilized into the army over the last two years with the promise of a pardon and freedom from imprisonment if they fought for six months. Many military age guards were mobilized into the army. The reduced the number of criminals in jails and increased the proportion of political prisoners, Ukrainian civilians and Ukrainian POWS being confined by fewer guards. The government decided to not let families know that their sons had been killed in prison violence and often refused to release the bodies to families for burial when the families discovered their imprisoned sons were dead.

The violence in the prisons is a result of the Ukraine war and has become another battlefield in that war whether the government wants to admit it or not.