A 24-year-old migrant worker from Kyrgyzstan, Eleman enlisted in the military at a Russian prison in 2023 with the promise of parole, big money, and Russian citizenship in return for six months of combat in Ukraine.
In jail for drug trafficking, he was sent to the front line after just a few days of training, his family says.
Eleman, whose last name is being withheld due to possible retribution, was forced to remain on the battlefield even after his contract had ended despite being wounded, his father, Anarkul, told RFE/RL.
"My son spent several days in the hospital unconscious. When he came around he was sent back to the war although he still had bandages on his head and arm," Anarkul said.
"If you're alive and can shoot, it's enough for them to send you to the combat zone," he said.
Eleman was finally discharged from the military earlier this year after he sustained even more severe injuries that left him disabled, said Anarkul, who lives in the southern Kyrgyz region of Osh.
Eleman is one of thousands of inmates in Russia who were recruited to fight in Ukraine as Moscow struggles to replenish its depleting forces while trying to avoid another unpopular mobilization.
Russia's Defense Ministry began enlisting inmates in early 2023, taking over from the notorious Wagner mercenary group that started the prisoner-recruitment scheme in July 2022 -- five months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Wagner had enlisted nearly 50,000 prisoners -- 20 percent of whom were killed in Ukraine -- as of May 2023, according to the group's founder, Evgeniy Prigozhin. Prigozhin fell out of favor with the Kremlin before dying in a suspicious plane crash in August 2023.
The Defense Ministry has expanded the practice of recruiting inmates to the extent that dozens of penal colonies in Russia were emptied and closed, according to human rights activists.
Olga Romanova, director of the civil rights organization Russia Behind Bars, says 53 prisons were closed this year alone.
The ministry has also turned pretrial-detention facilities and immigration-detention centers -- which hold hundreds of migrant workers mainly from Central Asian countries -- into recruitment hubs.
Multiple accounts by inmates, their relatives, and human rights groups suggest Russian officials have made prison conditions unbearably harsh and inhumane in an effort to pressure inmates into joining the military.
"They keep you in a cold cell, you sleep on the floor with just a pillow underneath you holding plastic bottles filled with hot water to keep warm," is how one Kyrgyz inmate described his bleak life in a prison in central Russia.
RFE/RL cannot independently verify the claims, but they align with accounts by several other inmates from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan serving in prisons across Russia. There have also been claims of severe beatings and psychological abuse to try and force people to enlist in the army.
The father of another Kyrgyz inmate incarcerated in the Sverdlovsk region said his son told him that prisoners "had to drink their own urine after being kept in isolation for days without food or water."
"Some of the inmates who were there for seven or eight years say they haven't experienced anything like this before," says Gulnara Zakirova, whose son Erlan was killed in battle in Ukraine in 2023 after being recruited from prison by Wagner.
Pushed To The Firing Line
Once recruited into the military, the convicts are treated as an expendable force, with little consideration for their lives, several former inmates and relatives told RFE/RL.
They say the convicts are also often thrown onto the front line after just a few days of military training.
"They push us to the line of fire. They deploy us to the most dangerous battle zones. They don't even collect the dead inmates' bodies," said 24-year-old Kyrgyz inmate turned soldier Azamat, who requested his last name not be used.
Azamat told RFE/RL by telephone in early October that he was receiving medical treatment for bullet wounds at a hospital in the Russian-occupied Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine.
Despite being in the war zone for just two months, it was the second time Azamat was wounded, according to medical records he shared with RFE/RL.
"The first time they sent me back to the combat zone even though I hadn't fully recovered. This time I was hospitalized with shrapnel wounds in my back. I had surgery two days ago, but the doctors want to send me to war again," he said.
"No one is allowed to go back home from here," he added.
WATCH: Increasingly oppressive conditions inside Russian prisons are driving desperate inmates to enlist in the military to fight in Ukraine.
RFE/RL has since been unable to contact Azamat, but his sister -- a migrant worker in Russia -- said he had returned to his military unit. "He said if he refused to go he would be shot dead," she said.
According to court documents seen by RFE/RL, Azamat, a former shopkeeper, had been sentenced to five years in prison by a Moscow court earlier this year. The family requested other details of his case not be disclosed.
Azamat was recruited in August and signed a contract that included three months of military training before spending another three months in combat, his sister said.
"But just 10 days into his contract he was already deployed in the battle zone and was wounded," she told RFE/RL.
"There are many Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in his unit. From the stories he heard from them, Azamat realized he won't be released at the end of his contract.… You are stuck there until you're dead or severely disabled."
The comments echo accounts by dozens of others who claim that convicts fighting in Ukraine are forced to reenlist after their contracts expire.
In Osh, Eleman's father said Russian authorities also don't honor their promises of money and other incentives in exchange for joining the army. Though his son was given a Russian passport and a one-off payment of $5,000 and several medals, he doesn't receive the monthly allowance and benefits available to other war veterans in Russia, he said.
As Eleman prepares to undergo another surgery in Moscow to remove bullets, the family has heard that the other members of his unit were forced to extend their contracts.
Kyrgyzstan says some 1,500 Kyrgyz nationals are serving time in Russian prisons, most of them accused of drug trafficking.
The number of Tajik inmates and detainees in Russia was estimated at about 10,000 before the Ukraine invasion.
The exact number of Central Asian prisoners in Russia is unknown. Nor is it clear how many Central Asian inmates were recruited to war from Russian prisons. RFE/RL reporters have documented dozens of cases of Central Asian convicts being killed in Ukraine.
Kyrgyzstan has returned about 100 of its nationals from Russian prisons to serve the remainder of their sentences in Kyrgyzstan. About 500 other such requests by Bishkek have been rejected by Russian authorities.
