The number of prisoners in Russia has dropped by more than 180,000 over five years, in part driven by Moscow sending convicts to fight in Ukraine, Russia's prison chief said on Thursday.
In four years of war, Russia has offered prisoners army contracts to fight in Ukraine and buy out their sentences, should they survive.
Russia, which has a massive prison network inherited from Soviet labour camps, has one of the world's largest convict populations, though that number has been decreasing in the last 20 years.
"If at the end of 2021 there were 465,000 (prisoners), then now there are 282,000," the head of Russia's penitentiary service, Arkady Gostev, said, according to the TASS state news agency.
That represents a drop of nearly 40%.
