Russia is recruiting convicted women from penal colonies in occupied regions of Ukraine to help in Moscow’s war effort, a report by the Ukrainian military noted. In its intelligence report, Ukraine’s military said that Russian forces were trying to “replenish” their army.
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“In order to replenish the losses in manpower, the enemy is trying to attract convicted women to participate in hostilities. Over the course of a week, the occupiers recruited about 50 people from the women’s correctional colony of the city of Snizhne in the temporarily occupied territory of the Donetsk region. It is also known that they were sent to the territory of the Russian Federation for training,” the statement said.
In September last year, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilisation in Russia aiming to draft 300,000 reservists to support its military campaign. However, later reports suggested that Russian was recruiting homeless people and those with little military experience to reinforce its army.
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Meanwhile, two Russian S-300 missiles hit the center of Kharkiv in Ukraine, the city’s mayor said. Ukraine’s Odesa and the surrounding area are still struggling with power outages as Kyiv repelled assaults near 9 settlements in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, Reuters reported. Ukraine is also likely to replace its defense minister Oleksii Reznikov as Kyiv braces for a Russian offensive, a senior lawmaker said.
