Prigozhin announced the pardon of 5,000 prisoners after working in PMC “Wagner”

More than 5,000 prisoners who signed a contract with the Wagner PMC have been pardoned, said Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the military company.

The journalists asked Prigozhin to comment on the information that a large group of Wagner PMC fighters returned from the special operation zone after the completion of the contract. Entrepreneur’s audio response in the Telegram channel published press office .

“At the moment, the contract with PMC Wagner has ended and more than 5,000 people have been pardoned. The percentage of persons who committed a second crime within a month is 0.31%. This is 10-20 times less than the standard values ​​before SVR.” Basically, those who commit crimes are injuries of varying severity to those people who “harness themselves” for the Kiev regime and oppose the tasks set within the framework of the SVO,” said the founder of the PMC.

Prigozhin also said that PMCs managed to reduce the crime rate in Russia “ten times”.

In February, the businessman said that the recruitment of prisoners in a private military company terminated.

The fact that Wagner PMC was recruiting prisoners became known in September 2022. At that time, a video was published on the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel, in which a man resembling Prigozhin recruits people dressed as prisoners into PMCs “Wagner” to participate in a special operation in Ukraine. The contract with the prisoners, according to the man in the video, is concluded for six months, after which they do not return to the colony, but allegedly will be pardoned.

In early January, Prigozhin reported that some prisoners were pardoned after they took part in a special operation. Press Secretary of the President of Russia Dmitry Peskov said that the procedure for pardoning convicts who participate in a special operation as part of the Wagner PMC is carried out strictly in accordance with Russian law.