President Vladimir Putin (pictured) intends to deploy women in combat roles, intel suggests
- Ukrainian intelligence suggests women are being pressured into combat roles
- News follows MoD reports that Russia has depleted its forces with wave attacks
- Russia admitted women to its air force in October 2022, the first since WWII
Ukraine has alleged that Russia is forcibly enlisting women into its army to replenish numbers for human wave attacks.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said in a statement yesterday Russia had this week ‘recruited about 50 people from the women’s correctional colony in the city of Snizhne in the temporarily occupied territory of the Donetsk region’.
‘It is also known that they were sent to the territory of the Russian Federation for training.’
The report said: ‘In order to make up for the loss of manpower, the enemy is trying to attract convicted women to participate in the hostilities.’
The Armed Forces of Ukraine previously reported in December that 28 Russian women had been drafted and sent for training to compensate for losses of units in the 1st Army Corps.
Russia does not usually deploy women in combat roles.
‘Night Witches’: women deployed by Stalin in WWII in the Soviet air force from October 1941
On Friday, the UK’s Ministry of Defence reported that Russia was struggling to maintain its supply of convicts and would not be able to rely on ‘human wave-style assault’ any longer.
A Russian source, likely an insider within mercenary group Wagner Group, shared that as a result of the suicidal tactics of Wagner Group squads, ‘losses are growing and progress [slowing] down’.
Wagner Group is a Russian paramilitary organisation, first deployed in the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and now a private extension of the Russian army in Ukraine with close ties to Putin.
Wagner Group and the Russian Army have used battalions staffed with former convicts – promised their freedom for reliable service – since last year.
Experts and insiders have documented Russia’s approach of sending wave after wave of prisoners with ‘nothing to lose’ to advance the frontline.
White House spokesman John Kirby said in January that an estimated 50,000 fighters from Wagner Group were currently in Ukraine, about 40,000 of which are convicts.
The conscription of women to Russia’s combined forces would be a new development in the war as Putin looks to build up numbers.
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By: Miss Cherry May Timbol – Independent Reporter
