Vladimir Putin’s confidant and founder of the paramilitary mercenary organization Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, says he’s working to send female prison inmates to operate as snipers and saboteurs in Ukraine.
The Russian oligarch, dubbed “Putin’s chef” for running a catering company, unveiled his plan in a statement released by his business’s press service Wednesday.
Prigozhin was responding to a proposal made by Vyacheslav Vegner, a lawmaker from the Sverdlovsk region of Russia, who said he had been approached by a group of female inmates serving time in a local penal colony who he said were prepared to deploy to Ukraine as doctors, nurses and communications operators.
Prigozhin replied that he “fully agrees” with Vegner’s proposal, but suggested that it does not go far enough.
“[Female inmates] should serve not only as nurses and communications operators, but also in sabotage groups and sniper pairs,” he wrote in his response.
“Everyone knows that this has been widely used,” he added. “We are working in this direction. There is pushback, but I think we will prevail.”
The fledgling plan to rope female prisoners into the invasion comes as Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu outlined a proposal to expand the country’s military to 1.5 million combat personnel from the current 1.15 million.
This was required “to guarantee the solving of problems related to Russia’s military security,” Shoigu told Putin during a televised meeting Wednesday. He said 695,000 of the fighters should be professional contracted soldiers — as opposed to conscripts serving mandatory military service.
Prigozhin’s hirelings from the Wagner Group are said to be leading the fight on the front line in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which Russian forces have repeatedly tried and failed to capture.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday visited Bakhmut, which has seen some of the most intense combat of the conflict, to thank the soldiers and award medals on the eve of his unprecedented wartime overseas trip to Washington, DC, to ask President Biden for more weapons.
Prigozhin has published several videos claiming he had traveled to an area near Bakhmut in hope of speaking to Zelensky directly.
The Institute for the Study of War, a DC-based think tank, argued that Prigozhin’s attempted diplomatic overtures undermined Putin’s authority.
“Prigozhin’s purported appearance on the frontline further weakens Putin’s presentation of himself as a wartime leader, since Putin has not even visited Russian-occupied territories, let alone gone anywhere near the front lines,” ISW’s assessment stated.
