When Freedom Depends on a Commander: Women Recruited From Prison Describe Abuse
Women who traded prison sentences for Russian military contracts say the same system that promised them a way out left them exposed to sexual coercion and retaliation.
A promise of freedom can become a form of power in the hands of the person who seems able to grant it. That tension runs through Verstka’s investigation of women recruited from Russian prisons for military service and through the allegations of sexual coercion they describe.
The women were not ordinary volunteers entering an ordinary workplace. According to the investigation, recruits were offered one-year contracts, monthly pay from 220,000 rubles, compensation for wounds and release from the remainder of their sentences. Several hundred were trained and sent to the war against Ukraine, largely as military medics.
For someone in prison, those terms could represent a second chance. Once inside the military, however, the women’s daily safety was controlled by a hierarchy that could send them closer to the front. One interviewee said a commander offered to keep women at a hospital if they came to him at night. Some agreed. She later said the women learned that he had no real power to decide their assignments. The promise itself, whether genuine or not, could exploit fear of battlefield danger.
Lyudmila Poltarakova’s story shows the moral stakes at their most severe. She told Verstka that regimental commander Sergey Zhitkov initially summoned her to give massages and later became aggressive. She alleges he raped her in February 2025 and continued sexually abusing her in March. No public court judgment establishes Zhitkov’s guilt, so the accusation remains Poltarakova’s account.
Poltarakova says she was later expected to provide sexual services to another senior serviceman. After she objected, she was transferred to a different medical battalion. She says she was forced to sign a document stating that Zhitkov had not abused her and that she did so because she feared for her future service.
In June 2026, according to Verstka, she reported the alleged rape to a military prosecutor. Soon after, she began speaking publicly about an order sending her to the front and said she feared she could be killed there. On June 30, a separate outlet published an appeal identifying her as a contract servicemember in the 370th Separate Medical Battalion. In that appeal she spoke of more than 80 convicted women who had signed Defense Ministry contracts and described women evacuating wounded and dead soldiers from frontline areas.
A July 1 publication reported another statement in which Poltarakova said an urgent order had been issued for her to go forward and that she feared for her life. Verstka later reported that she was alive and at the front. The outlet also said authorities opened a criminal case against her for refusing a combat order, while no criminal case was opened over her rape complaint. Public prosecution or court records independently establishing those procedural details have not surfaced in the sources reviewed.
The story also stretches further back than 2024. Current Time reported female prisoner recruitment in March 2023, including activity by Defense Ministry representatives. RFE/RL later interviewed a woman who signed a military contract from prison in summer 2023 and served as a nurse in the Donetsk region. She described having to fend off soldiers’ advances and said recruitment promises did not always match actual conditions.
That earlier record matters because it shows that the vulnerability was foreseeable. When the state recruits people whose liberty it already controls, it assumes an even greater obligation to prevent the new authority relationship from becoming another form of coercion. Money, a reduced sentence and a safer posting cannot be meaningful choices if access to them can be manipulated for sex.
Poltarakova’s next chapter now depends on institutions outside the immediate command relationship she has accused. Whether her complaint receives an independent investigation will determine more than her own case. It will show whether women recruited from prison are treated as servicemembers with enforceable rights or as people whose dependence can be used against them without consequence.
