Memorandum
- From
- Delaney Sawyer
- Date
- Filed
- Society·5 min to read
- Re
How Prison Recruitment Created a New Layer of Vulnerability for Russian Women at War
ReHow Prison Recruitment Created a New Layer of Vulnerability for Russian Women at War
Women offered military contracts as a path out of prison describe coercion, sexual demands and a chain of command that controlled both their safety and their promised release.
The central problem in Verstka’s investigation of women recruited from Russian prisons is not only what individual commanders allegedly did. It is the structure the women entered: a military hierarchy in which their place of service, physical safety and hope of avoiding the rest of a prison sentence could all depend on people above them.
According to the investigation, women in the recruitment stream were offered one-year contracts, pay beginning at 220,000 rubles a month, injury payments and release from the remainder of their sentences. Several hundred were trained and sent to the war against Ukraine as military medics.
That arrangement created a powerful imbalance. A woman leaving prison for a contract was not simply taking a new job. She was moving from one coercive institution into another, with the additional danger of frontline service. In that setting, the promise of a hospital assignment instead of a position nearer the front could carry enormous weight.
One interviewee told Verstka that a commander used exactly that leverage. He allegedly said women could remain at a hospital if they came to him at night. Some accepted the arrangement. The woman later said they learned he could not actually decide where they would be assigned. The allegation describes coercion built not around a direct threat, but around the belief that a commander could determine who faced greater battlefield danger.
Lyudmila Poltarakova’s account is more explicit. She says regimental commander Sergey Zhitkov first called her in to give massages, then became aggressive. Poltarakova told Verstka that Zhitkov raped her in February 2025 and that the abuse continued into March. Her account is an allegation and has not been established by a publicly available court judgment.
Poltarakova says the pressure continued afterward. She alleges that she was expected to provide sexual services to another senior serviceman. When she protested, she was moved to another medical battalion, but says she was made to sign a statement denying that Zhitkov had used violence against her. She said fear about her future service led her to sign it.
In June 2026, Verstka reports, Poltarakova filed a rape complaint with a military prosecutor. She later said she was being ordered to the front and feared the assignment could be used to eliminate her. Other reporting helps establish the surrounding timeline. On June 30, a publication identified her as a member of the 370th Separate Medical Battalion and carried an appeal in which she described more than 80 convicted women who had signed Defense Ministry contracts. She said women in the unit worked in evacuation teams at the front. A July 1 report carried another statement in which she said she had been urgently ordered forward and feared for her life.
Verstka says Poltarakova was later known to be alive and at the front. The outlet also reports that she faces a criminal case for refusing a combat order and that no criminal case was opened over her rape complaint. No public procedural documents were located that independently establish those two case statuses, so the claims require attribution to the investigation.
The timeline also needs a correction that matters for understanding the system. The new investigation describes recruitment beginning in 2024 for the women it follows, but reporting on female prisoner recruitment dates back earlier. Current Time reported in March 2023 that women prisoners were being recruited and moved for the war. RFE/RL later interviewed a woman who enlisted from a prison colony in summer 2023, became a nurse in the Donetsk region and recalled unwanted advances from soldiers as well as promises that did not match reality.
Seen together, those accounts show a recurring institutional problem. Prison recruitment offered women money and a path toward freedom while placing them in a military structure with extraordinary power over both. The next significant development in Poltarakova’s story will be whether her rape complaint produces an investigation with safeguards independent of the commanders she accused and the institution that still controls her service.
Source: Source: Verstka