At about 06:45 on 28 March, police arrived at Andrey Perlov’s home close to Novosibirsk in Siberia.

They accused him of stealing about three million roubles ($32,000; £24,000) from a Novosibirsk soccer membership the place he was the managing director – he and his household deny this.

Perlov, who’s 62, is an Olympic gold medallist, having received the 50km race stroll in 1992.

He has been detained for greater than six months and his household says he’s being pressured to comply with combat in Ukraine. He’s been instructed that, in return, the embezzlement case towards him can be frozen and probably dropped when the battle ends.

It’s no secret that prisoners have been recruited to combat in Ukraine, however BBC evaluation can reveal how the preliminary deal with convicted criminals has shifted to incorporate individuals but to face trial.

The newest legal guidelines imply that each prosecution and defence legal professionals at the moment are legally obliged to tell people who find themselves charged with most crimes that they’ve the choice to go to battle as a substitute of court docket.

The laws, handed in March 2024, implies that in the event that they enroll, the prosecution and any investigation might be stopped. Their instances will typically be closed utterly on the finish of the battle.

“This has turned Russia’s law enforcement system upside down,” says Olga Romanova, the director of Russia Behind Bars – an NGO that gives authorized help to detainees.

“Police can now catch a man over a corpse of someone he has just killed. They tighten the handcuffs and then the killer says: ‘Oh wait, I want to go on a special military operation,’ and they close the criminal case.”

We acquired a leaked recording of an investigator describing some great benefits of signing a contract with the Russian military to somebody whose husband had already been sentenced to 3 years for theft.

“He can get six more for this other crime,” he tells her. “I offered him a chance to sign an agreement. If his request is approved, he will go to war and we will close the case.”

If the accused indicators, inside a couple of days the prison case is suspended, they usually go away for the entrance line virtually instantly.

Three legal professionals working in Russia confirmed that this has grow to be the norm throughout the nation.

Some enroll within the hope of avoiding jail and a prison report – but it surely’s not a simple approach out, as teenager Yaroslav Lipavsky found.

He signed a contract with the military after he was accused of deliberately inflicting “serious harm to health by a group of persons by prior agreement”.

His younger girlfriend had simply discovered she was pregnant and with the intention to keep away from prosecution, Lipavsky signed up with the navy as quickly as he turned 18.

He left for Ukraine and every week later was lifeless – one of many youngest troopers to die within the battle.

It’s not clear how many individuals accused of crimes have opted to combat as a substitute of dealing with trial, however this shift in coverage displays Russia’s want to strengthen troops whereas minimising the variety of different civilians it must mobilise.

“Do Russians care about convicts or those who are in prison? I suspect that they don’t,” says Michael Kofman, navy analyst on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He thinks the federal government “likely assumes that these are people they can lose, that nobody will miss and that they will not have a substantial, negative effect on the overall economy”.

When the Wagner mercenary group first recruited jail inmates, its late chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, focused convicts in high-security jails, saying he wanted their “criminal talents” in return for pardons.

The BBC and Russian web site Mediazona have seen and verified confidential paperwork that make clear the method of recruiting prisoners, what has occurred to a lot of them and the necessity to keep the move of recent fighters.

We know, from analysing the canine tags of convicts who died in Ukraine and funds made to their households, that Wagner recruited practically 50,000 inmates from penal colonies, and at one level had been shedding as much as 200 in motion day-after-day. Many others had been injured.

All prisoners’ canine tags begin with the letter Ok, which stands for “kolonya” or jail colony.

The first three numbers determine the jail the place they got here from and the final three numbers determine the recruit, given out in sequence – so the upper the quantity, the extra recruits got here from that colony.

Payment data present that greater than 17,000 prisoners had been killed making an attempt to seize the town of Bakhmut in japanese Ukraine between July 2022 and June 2023 alone.

To plug the losses, Wagner, and later the Ministry of Defence, have tailored their recruitment methods to broaden the pool of individuals they’ll draw on.

Some individuals accused of crimes refuse the brand new deal as a result of they’re towards the battle in precept, others as a result of the danger of dying or being injured on the battlefield is just too nice, and others as a result of they need to keep at house to combat their case.

But they’ll come underneath big stress from the authorities, says Andrey Perlov’s daughter Alina.

“He refused and we made quite a big noise in the local media so he was sent to the strict punishment cell, where they brought him the contract again.”

She provides that when he refused a second time, he was forbidden from seeing or calling his household.

They nonetheless hope to show his innocence, however the final time Alina noticed her father in court docket in mid-July, he had misplaced numerous weight. “He tries to keep himself cheerful,” she says, “but if this goes on, they will break him.”

We requested the Russian authorities about Andrey Perlov’s case and whether or not they’re unfairly pressurising detainees to affix the military. They didn’t reply. – BBC