In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the head of St. Petersburg’s prisons delivered a direct message to an elite unit of guards tasked with overseeing the influx of prisoners from the war: “Be cruel, don’t pity them.”
Maj. Gen. Igor Potapenko had gathered his service’s special forces at the regional headquarters to tell them about a new system that had been designed for captured Ukrainians.
Normal rules wouldn’t apply, he told them. There would be no restrictions against violence. The body cameras that were mandatory elsewhere in Russia’s prison system would be gone.
The guards would rotate through Russia’s prison system, serving a month at a time in prisons before other teams took their place. Across the country, other units—from Buryatia, Moscow, Pskov and elsewhere—received similar instructions.
