In the annexed Crimea, during the year of Russia's war against Ukraine, the number of prisoners has increased significantly, Mediazona writes.

 In 2022, the number of prisoners in Crimean prisons increased by 416. A significant increase was also recorded in the Smolensk region - 868 prisoners. At the same time, journalists are surprised by such figures, since no news about newly built colonies has appeared.

 At the same time, during the year of the war in a number of regions of Russia, the prisons were under 17 thousand prisoners. The publication notes that official data on the number of prisoners recruited for the war with Ukraine are not published.

 The scale of recruitment can be estimated from prison population statistics. "But the Federal Penitentiary Service stopped publishing it for a while, and in January reported that it was no longer being reduced," Mediazona writes.

 Journalists analyzed the data on the websites of 35 regional offices of the FSVP and found out that by the beginning of 2023, the number of prisoners in these regions has decreased by a total of 17,000.

 The largest number of prisoners "disappeared" in Samara (2,723), Chelyabinsk (1,574), and Kirov regions (1,153), as well as in Tatarstan (1,040).

 In February 2023, Prigozhin announced that his PMC had stopped recruiting prisoners. In the same month, the head of the "Sitting Russia" foundation, Olga Romanova, reported that the recruitment of prisoners in the colonies was ongoing, but the people leading it began to say that they represented the Ministry of Defense. According to her, contracts for 18 months have begun with prisoners recruited by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.