At approximately 06:45 on March 28, police arrived at Andrey Perlov’s home near Novosibirsk in Siberia.
They accused him of stealing around three million rubles ($32,000; £24,000) from the Novosibirsk football club where he was managing director – which he and his family deny.
Perlov, 62, is an Olympic gold medalist, having won the 50km race in 1992.
He has been in prison for more than six months and his family says he is being pressured to agree to fight in Ukraine. He was told that, in return, the fraud charges against him would be suspended and possibly dropped when the war ended.
It’s no secret that prisoners are being recruited to fight in Ukraine, but a BBC analysis can reveal how the initial concentration of convicted criminals has changed to include people yet to be tried.
Recent laws mean that both prosecuting and defense lawyers are now legally obliged to inform people charged with multiple crimes that they have the option of going to war instead of going to court.
The law, which was passed in March 2024, means that if they register, prosecution and any investigation will be stopped. Their cases will usually be completely closed at the end of the war.
“This has turned the Russian legal system upside down,” said Olga Romanova, director of Russia Behind Bars – an NGO that provides legal aid to detainees.
“The police can still arrest a man over the body of a person they just killed. They tighten the handcuffs and the killer says: ‘Well, stop, I want to go to fight a special war,’ and close the criminal case.”
We got a leaked recording of a detective explaining the benefits of signing a deal with the Russian army to a man whose husband had been sentenced to three years for theft.
“He could get six more for this other crime,” he told her. “I gave him the opportunity to sign the contract. If his request is approved, he will go to war and we will close the case.”
If the defendant signs, within a few days the criminal case is dismissed, and they move forward quickly.
Three lawyers working in Russia confirmed that this has become a common practice throughout the country.
Some sign up in hopes of avoiding prison and a criminal record – but it’s not an easy way out, as young Yaroslav Lipavsky found out.
He signed a contract with the military after he was accused of intentionally causing “a group of people serious damage to life in a previous agreement”.
His young girlfriend had just found out she was pregnant and to avoid prosecution, Lipavsky enlisted in the army as soon as he turned 18.
He went to Ukraine and a week later he was dead – one of the youngest soldiers to die in the war.
It is not clear how many people accused of crimes have chosen to fight rather than stand trial, but this shift in policy reflects Russia’s need to strengthen the military while reducing the number of other citizens who need to be mobilized.
“Do the Russians care about prisoners or detainees? I suspect they don’t,” said Michael Koffman, a military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He thinks that the government “might think that these are the people they can lose, that no one will miss out and they won’t have a big, bad impact on the economy as a whole”.
When Wagner’s gang recruited prisoners for the first time, its late leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, directed the prisoners to high-security prisons, saying he needed their “criminal skills” to gain amnesty.
The BBC website and Russian Mediazona have seen and confirmed secret documents that shed light on the process of recruiting prisoners, what happened to many of them and the need to maintain the flow of new soldiers.
We know, from analyzing the dog tags of prisoners who died in Ukraine and the payments made to their families, that Wagner employed nearly 50,000 prisoners in penal colonies, and at one point he was losing up to 200 out of work every day. Many others were injured.
All the prisoners’ dog tags start with the letter K, which stands for “kolonya” or prison colony.
The first three numbers identify the prison they came from and the last three numbers identify the conscript, given in order – so the higher the number, the more conscripts were from that colony.
Payment records show that more than 17,000 prisoners were killed trying to capture the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine between July 2022 and June 2023 alone.
To cover the loss, Wagner, and later the Department of Defense, changed their recruiting strategies to expand the pool of people they could use.
Some criminal suspects reject the new deal because they oppose the war, some because the risk of death or injury on the battlefield is too great, and some want to stay at home to fight their case.
But they can be under a lot of pressure from the authorities, says Andrey Perlov’s daughter Alina.
“He refused and we made a lot of noise in the local media so he was sent to a strong punishment cell, and that’s when they brought him the contract again.”
He adds that when he refused the second time, he was forbidden to see or call his family.
They still hope to prove his innocence, but the last time Alina saw her father in court in mid-July, he had lost a lot of weight. He says: “He is trying to keep himself happy, but if this continues, they will break him.”
We asked the Russian authorities about the case of Andrey Perlov and whether they are unfairly pressuring prisoners to join the military. They didn’t answer.
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