Politics 5 min read By Arthur Ellington
Russia’s Prison-Recruitment System Faces Allegations of Sexual Abuse in the Chain of Command
Women recruited from penal colonies say commanders used control over postings and military discipline to coerce them. The allegations raise questions about accountability inside a wartime manpower system.
Russia’s use of prisoners as a wartime manpower pool has created an accountability problem that goes beyond recruitment numbers. A new investigation by Verstka describes female convicts who entered military service for pay and the prospect of release, then alleged sexual coercion by officers who controlled their assignments and careers.
According to Verstka, women in the recruitment stream it examined were offered one-year contracts, salaries starting at 220,000 rubles a month, injury compensation and release from the unserved portion of their sentences. Several hundred women were trained and sent to the war against Ukraine as military medics.
That model concentrated several kinds of leverage in the chain of command. The state controlled the women’s criminal sentences, the military controlled their postings, and individual commanders could appear to control their exposure to frontline risk. One interviewee said a commander offered women hospital assignments instead of being sent forward if they visited him at night. Some accepted. She later said they learned that he had no authority to decide their postings.
Lyudmila Poltarakova’s allegation is more serious. She told Verstka that regimental commander Sergey Zhitkov first summoned her for massages and then became aggressive. She alleges that he raped her in February 2025 and continued sexual violence in March. The allegation has not been adjudicated in a publicly available court decision.
Poltarakova also says she was subsequently expected to provide sexual services to another high-ranking serviceman. After she protested, she was moved to another medical battalion, but says she was compelled to sign a statement denying that Zhitkov had abused her. She attributed that decision to fear about the consequences for her service.
In June 2026, Verstka reports, Poltarakova filed a rape complaint with a military prosecutor. She later said she was urgently being sent to the front and feared the order could be used to eliminate her. A separate June 30 publication identified Poltarakova as a contract servicemember in the 370th Separate Medical Battalion and published her account that more than 80 female prisoners had signed Defense Ministry contracts. She described their work in frontline medical evacuation teams.
On July 1, another report carried her statement that she had received an urgent order to deploy forward and feared for her life. Verstka later reported that she remained alive and at the front. The outlet says a criminal case was opened against her for refusing a combat order and that no criminal case was opened over her rape complaint. Those procedural claims are not independently supported by public court or prosecution documents in the available record.
The manpower policy has a longer history than the latest investigation’s 2024 recruitment phase. Current Time was reporting on female prisoner recruitment and Defense Ministry involvement in March 2023. RFE/RL subsequently interviewed a woman who signed up from prison in summer 2023 and worked as a nurse in the Donetsk region. She described unwanted advances by soldiers and said promised conditions differed from reality.
The institutional issue is therefore not simply whether one commander committed a crime. Russia created a recruitment route that moved people directly from penal custody into a wartime hierarchy. That route made senior officers gatekeepers for safety and, in the recruits’ understanding, for the benefits that justified their enlistment.
If complaints against commanders are handled through the same hierarchy that controls dangerous assignments, the system carries an obvious retaliation risk. Poltarakova’s case will now turn on whether military prosecutors create a credible separation between the complainant’s service obligations and the investigation of the officers she accused. Without that separation, prison recruitment does not merely fill personnel gaps; it embeds a new class of especially dependent servicemembers inside an already opaque military institution.
