A Brigade of Prisoners of War — The Personnel Desperation of the Russian Ministry of Defense Crosses Red Lines

On August 6, 2026, the Volunteer Corps of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation announced the creation of the "First Ukrainian Volunteer Special Forces Brigade." Behind this cumbersome formulation lies not just another bureaucratic construct of the military department, but an event that brings together three alarming trends: the personnel depletion of the Russian army, systematic violations of international humanitarian law, and the gradual erasure of the line between "voluntariness" and coercion. Forty thousand losses per month and one and a half million total sanitary and irretrievable losses over four and a half years of war — this context makes the creation of a brigade from Ukrainian prisoners of war not a propaganda gesture, but an indicator of the depth of the personnel crisis (according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the total combat losses of Russian forces as of August 7, 2026, amounted to about 1,455,420 people, including 1,210 in the previous day).

The new brigade, as reported by the Volunteer Corps, was formed by merging several so-called volunteer units — the battalions named after Maxim Krivonos and Alexey Berest, as well as the detachments named after Alexander Matrosov, Martyn Pushkar, and Slobodsky. The Russian side claims that these formations include Ukrainian prisoners of war and former servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who "allegedly switched sides to Russia." The caveat "allegedly" is crucial here. In conditions where, according to Ukrainian ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets, more than 95% of Ukrainian prisoners in Russia are subjected to systematic torture, the voluntariness of such "switching" is a purely procedural concept. I remind you: as early as December 2023, the Russian occupation authorities of the DPR deployed the "Bohdan Khmelnytskyi" battalion — also formed from prisoners — as part of the "Cascade" formation in the western part of the Donetsk region. The precedent is not new, but the scale and institutionalization — through the official Volunteer Corps of the Ministry of Defense — elevate this practice to a fundamentally different level.

The Geneva Convention as a Formality

From the perspective of international law, the situation is extremely clear. Article 7 of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War prohibits prisoners of war from renouncing their rights "under any circumstances," and Article 50 directly limits the types of work to which prisoners may be assigned, excluding any military activity or work in dangerous conditions — "in particular, demining or similar work involving risk to life." The use of prisoners in a combat unit operating in a combat zone is a gross violation — regardless of whether they are referred to as "volunteers" in a press release.

It is noteworthy that at least one Russian military blogger openly discussed that the new brigade is staffed with Ukrainian prisoners of war — a statement that in itself constitutes an admission of a war crime, notes ISW.

Here we observe a classic technique of Soviet, and later Russian, military propaganda — the creation of "volunteer" formations from individuals whose choice between service and camp is a fiction. The historical parallel with the Hilfswillige — Soviet citizens who served in the Wehrmacht during World War II — is self-evident, although with a significant caveat: then it was about volunteers from the civilian population and prisoners of war in occupied territories, whereas today "recruitment" occurs under conditions of captivity and systematic violence. However, for the Russian military command, this difference appears to be insignificant.

Personnel Context — Forty Thousand a Month

To understand why Moscow is resorting to such blatant violations of conventions, one must look at the numbers. According to sources from RBC-Ukraine in military and political circles, the Russian army is losing up to 40,000 people per month, of which more than 60% are irretrievable losses. Contract recruitment, despite record financial incentives, covers almost 100% of planned targets — but "almost 100%" with losses of 40,000 means that the system is not forming new units, but is merely struggling to plug holes in existing ones. Separately, sources note the failure of recruitment in unmanned systems units — students and young people are offered service in UAV units as "safer and more prestigious," but the flow of volunteers is still absent.

This is a quantifiable crisis — a situation in which the math stops working in favor of the Kremlin. When the contract system fails to replenish losses, and each new wave of mobilization threatens domestic political stability (it is no coincidence that the National Guard has for the first time included measures to counter mobilization threats in its regulatory documents), logic suggests seeking non-traditional sources of replenishment. Ukrainian prisoners of war are precisely such a source. Moral and legal constraints in this logic take a back seat to the imperative of closing the personnel gap.

Institutionalization of Coercion

ISW has documented the use of prisoners of war in Russian combat units since November 2022. Over the past four years, this practice has evolved from the ad hoc use of individual prisoners in irregular formations to the creation of an official brigade under the auspices of the Volunteer Corps of the Ministry of Defense. This is an important institutional dynamic. If in 2022–2023 the use of prisoners could be attributed to "excesses of the performers" — PMCs, DPR/LPR battalions, Chechen units — now it is a matter of centralized policy, legitimized through the official structure of the ministry.

In this regard, it is worth recalling that as early as February 2026, I wrote about the transition of the Russian recruitment system from economic incentives (of the 2022–2024 model) to coercive methods. The creation of a brigade from prisoners of war is a logical continuation of this trend, its radicalization. If at the beginning of the year we were talking about "shadow mobilization" and tightening control over draft dodgers, by August 2026 we see direct recruitment from prisoner camps — using torture as a tool of "persuasion."

Conclusions and Forecast

The creation of the "Ukrainian Volunteer Special Forces Brigade" is an event that should be viewed on three levels. Legally — it is yet another gross violation of the Geneva Conventions, which, like previous ones, will not entail significant consequences for the Russian command in the foreseeable future. Militarily — it is an indicator of the depth of the personnel crisis, in which prisoners are viewed as an operationally significant resource (in other words, the situation is worse than publicly acknowledged). Politically — it is evidence of further radicalization of war methods and a lowering of the threshold of acceptability for the Kremlin.

The combat effectiveness of a unit formed from individuals who have been systematically tortured and coerced into service raises justified doubts. Historical experience — from the Vlasov units of the Wehrmacht to those forcibly mobilized in the DPR/LPR in 2022 — shows that such formations are characterized by extremely low reliability and a high level of desertion at the first opportunity. However, for the Russian command, it seems that the mere fact of having an additional brigade outweighs qualitative considerations. This is not a sign of strength. It is a sign that the personnel reserve of the Russian army is close to exhaustion, and the next logical step — a new wave of mobilization after the September elections to the State Duma — may turn out to be not a political choice, but a mathematical inevitability.