When it comes to mobilizing new soldiers, Russia will stop at nothing. Already at the beginning of the partial mobilization, old, sick and unfit men were sent to the front in Ukraine. The financier and founder of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin (61), even rented in prisons.
Earlier this week, the Ukrainian government announced that prisoners with contagious and dangerous diseases – including hepatitis C or HIV – are also being sent to war. The Institute for the Studies of War (ISW) also reported on it.
According to the Ukrainians, sick people are marked with bracelets – people with HIV wear a red bracelet, people with hepatitis C get a white one.
Wagner founder confirms recruitment of sick people
“More than a hundred prisoners with proven HIV or hepatitis C were recruited for Wagner from a single penal colony in the village of Metalostroy in the Leningrad region,” the Ukrainian government website said. “Russian doctors are known to systematically refuse to help injured people with hepatitis or HIV.” Ukrainian soldiers are said to have already captured Russian fighters with the associated diseases.
Prigozhin himself also confirmed the message, a CNN journalist wrote on Twitter. “In Russian legislation there are no restrictions for patients with hepatitis C or HIV infection,” the Wagner boss told the journalist. “I don’t see anything immoral in soldiers with hepatitis C and HIV who kill other soldiers without knowing if they were carriers of a virus while they were alive.”
The use of HIV-positive people poses a high risk
Using sick soldiers is always immoral. As German political scientist Carlo Masala (54) already explains in his book “World Disorder” (renewed version published in 2022), the deployment of HIV-positive soldiers can have serious consequences.
Using the example of infected soldiers in African and Asian countries, he explains that the deployment of sick people can lead to “the spread of HIV in the area of operations”. But this can also be problematic for your own troops: “The higher the proportion of infected people, the more difficult it is to deploy the armed forces.”
How the deployment of soldiers with HIV or hepatitis C will affect the Russian war in Ukraine cannot be said at this time. (chs)