Russia ‘sends WOMEN prisoners to Ukraine war zone for first time’

Russia is believed to be sending female prisoners to the Ukrainian war zone for the first time in a bid to make up for the heavy losses of Russian troops on the front lines.

Due to “heavy losses” in the war, Vladimir Putin has sought “alternative sources of manpower replacement,” the general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said.

‘Last week there was a movement to the Donetsk region of a train with reserved seats for the transport of prisoners. One of the wagons (was for) convicted women,” the Ukrainian armed forces said.

There had previously been credible information that Russia had transferred female convicts to Kuschevka in the Krasnodar region, near the war zone.

Here, some female prisoners, released under a special plan related to the war effort, were put to work as laborers in the fields, as well as in ‘greenhouses and stables’, possibly deployed to supply the army.

Olga Romanova of the Russian Behind Bars Foundation believes around 100 women were sent to Ukraine.

Male prisoners have been conscripted into Russia by the tens of thousands and have been offered a deal that cancels their sentences if they serve, and stay alive, six months on the front lines.

This has seen murderers, rapists and other violent criminals freed and ultimately freed by Putin, most serving in Wagner’s private army.

Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said last month that his group will no longer recruit prisoners to fight in Ukraine, without giving an explanation as to why.

But now there is proof the Russian Defense Ministry is directly registering convicts.

Last month, the Ukrainian general staff said that Russia was actively “trying to recruit convicted women to take part in hostilities.”

This was to ‘compensate for personnel losses’.

Some had been recruited from a women’s penal colony in Snezhnoye, a town in the occupied Donetsk region.

“It is also known that they are sent to the territory of the Russian Federation for training,” the Ukrainian general staff said.

Several hundred women in prisons in the Sverdlovsk region of the Urals have asked local MP Vyacheslav Wegner to send them to Ukraine, it was reported.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s boss, said there was “resistance” among Russian authorities to deploying women to the war zone.

However, reports suggest that the women are now being sent to the war zone, although their precise role is unknown.

Heavy losses on the battlefields have also forced Putin to desperately empty Russian museums of obsolete tanks in order to repurpose them for his war effort.

The footage shows old Soviet-era T-62s being “modernized” at a 24-hour factory in Chita, Siberia.

The push to modernize decades-old tanks highlights the desperation of Putin’s military machine as Ukraine receives the latest Western tanks.

Some of the tanks being refurbished at Plant 103 may be 60 years old and date from the time when Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev ruled the USSR.

“It is sad that the number of exhibits in military museums is being reduced,” said one report.

The UK Defense Ministry said today that Russian ammunition shortages have “worsened as extremely punitive shell rationing is in force on many parts of the front”.

“This has almost certainly been a key reason why no Russian formation has recently been able to generate operationally significant offensive action,” the Defense Ministry said in its latest intelligence report.