How Russia’s war on Drugs Provides a Steady Stream of Manpower for Ukraine Invasion

Drug dealing in Russia works through a series of dead drops. You place an order over Telegram or the dark web and receive directions to a secret stash, or a “treasure”, hidden somewhere in your city.

Synthetic stimulants such as mephedrone or speed are the most popular – cheaply and easily-produced within Russia, they’ve far outpaced organic highs such as heroin and cocaine, which must be smuggled from abroad.

Secreting these secret stashes is an army of couriers, or “treasure-men”,  paid several hundred rubles for planting each package. 

“My chemical journey began with pink amphetamines in the summer of 2018,” remembered Torchebus, who chronicles as a “narco-blogger” on Telegram.

“A couple of times, no more. However, in the fall of ’18 I’d already tried mephedrone, and off we went. After some time, about 5-6 months, I started selling a little hand-to-hand… And in the summer of 2019, I got a job as a treasure-man. [By 2021] I was transporting cocaine to Moscow City.”

Russia has the largest prison population in Europe, around a third of whom are there on drugs charges. This includes both ageing heroin addicts, as well as young Russians in their teenage years or early 20s who’ve been roped into burying “treasure.” The penalty can be as harsh as three-five years for possession, or 9-16 for distribution. 

However, in recent years the imprisoned population has fallen sharply – halving from over 860,000 in 2010 to some 433,000 – with a record 54,000 released in 2023 alone.

Has the nation which gave the world the gulag had a change of heart? Not quite. 

In 2022, Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary outfit Wagner and himself an ex-con, toured penitentiaries, promising inmates freedom if they enlisted, but warning not everyone would come back in one piece. Many were thrown straight in the fray.

In August 2023, Prigozhin suspiciously perished in a plane crash after leading a mutiny and Wagner was disbanded, but convict recruitment continued via the Russian army, with pardons signed by Vladimir Putin.

The two most common types of convict soldier were serving time for murder, and article 228 of the criminal code – narcotics. In other words, Russia’s war on drugs has created a surplus of manpower for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. 

On paper, small quantities for personal consumption are decriminalised in Russia – up to six grams of cannabis should result in a fine, not jail. So it’s curious, statistically, Moscow’s finest often find just enough drugs to lay a serious charge – and enough to convince potential bribe-payers into a trip to the ATM for an “on-the-spot fine”.

Less often, crimes are staged for political reasons.

“I imagined a situation where I’d be singled-out for writing the truth, but rather I thought I’d be killed. I didn’t imagine that I’d be detained and sent to prison on a drug charge,” Chechen journalist Zhalaudi Geriyev told Byline Times.

Geriyev was reporting for local news site Caucasian Knot when, in 2016, he was dragged off a minibus by a group of men, taken to the woods and tortured with a plastic bag over his head before being driven to a cemetery where police were waiting.

“They reached into [my] backpack and pulled out a black bag where there were 170-180 grams of marijuana… They never told me the specific reason [why I was targeted], but they told me I was working against the authorities, an enemy of the people… and that I should be glad I have not been executed but simply imprisoned, during which time I should be re-educated and grateful for this second chance,” he explained.

Geriyev spent the next three years in a prison camp.

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The Set Up – How Police Play Both Sides

The police have a database of known addicts which they use to plant evidence or plan stings, coercing targets into selling out friends or beating them into signing confessions.

Given the practice, it is likely a substantial portion of those arrested for drugs are innocent.

Police have also grown wise to the “treasure system” and sometimes even run certain shops themselves, providing them with easy arrests.

Narco-blogger, Torchebus, was caught by police after his girlfriend found out he was seeing someone else and locked him out of his Moscow apartment. After attempting to break in, police were called and found a gram of mephedrone on his friend, who, in order to save herself, told them exactly what Torchebus was doing.

Torchebus struck a deal with police whereby he’d let them access his phone and retrieve the coordinates of all the “treasures” he’d hidden, in exchange for being the only one charged.

He was 20 at the time, and after spending almost two years in a pretrial detention centre was sentenced to eight years jail.

Meanwhile, Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine began on 24 February 2022.

“I was tired of all this: I was tired of these four walls, of all these aspects of prison life with the prospect of getting out in six years as a fucking nobody,” Torchebus explained to Byline Times.

“Why would support me? So I decided to take a chance on the SMO (special military operation).”

After only a week of training from Wagner instructors, Torchebus was deployed straight to the trenches. 

Enlisting prisoners, many from poor families in smaller towns and villages, as cannon fodder to be thrown in the meatgrinder in Ukraine, allows the Kremlin to avoid drafting the sons of better-off families in Moscow and St Petersburg.

Prisoners, meanwhile, with less to lose, are itching to leave their inhumane confinement. One-in-five are HIV-positive, and feel they stand a better chance surviving the battlefield than their prison-issue medication. Others are motivated by genuine patriotism or the chance to regain self-worth and respect in their families and communities.

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High on the Frontline

Historically, Russian soldiers have often enjoyed bidding their horrific reality a fond farewell, whether through cocaine and morphine in the Civil War, or heroin and hashish in Afghanistan.

Ukraine is no exception: a recent report by the investigative site Verstka depicts an even more drugged-out war than what the Red Army conscripts fought in Afghanistan, with all sorts of uppers and downers delivered straight to the trenches courtesy of Telegram, while enterprising locals even harvest opium from garden poppies. The number of court martials for possession is steadily climbing.

Torchebus says his unit stayed sober.

“[Wild cannabis] grew on the training grounds, but we were warned anyone who plucks them will be fucked,” he recalled.

“And so at the front we didn’t have anything, not even alcohol. But that was with us, and I think you know how it was with others.”

There are reports of drug-addled soldiers being considered liabilities and summarily executed.

The attrition rate for Russia’s prison warriors is extremely high. As he stepped out of his dugout one day, Torchebus found himself on the receiving end of a Ukrainian drone strike.

By the time I dug myself out, my eardrums were almost completely obliterated, I suffered an eye contusion, and there are some pieces of shrapnel as well, but luckily there are few of them

Torchebus, Russian narco-blogger turned solider

Ukraine has also enlisted convict combatants, although overall Kyiv’s drug laws aren’t as repressive as the Kremlin’s, allowing for methadone therapy and more recently, medical marijuana.

The Russian ministry of defence has no system for handling large-scale PTSD, and it’s likely many traumatised soldiers will turn to chemical assistance to cope, especially if they have a history of drug use. However, a court will go easier on a veteran caught with drugs than a civilian, or indeed any crime, including rape and robbery.

“There is the story of a poet’s son who was jailed for treasures,” said a Moscow human rights lawyer, whose wife first defended him around 2018, and who asked to remain anonymous.

After serving his compulsory national service, the man “somehow couldn’t settle into everyday life: he got hooked on mephedrone and became a treasure-man”, and was later sentenced to a “relatively lenient” seven year jail term.

“It was precisely the positive character reference from the army that played a role,” the lawyer noted.

He went on to explain that in 2022, the man “left the colony for [Wagner]” serving six months as an artilleryman, but everything “went wrong again” when he returned home, and in 2023, he was detained in a taxi with 400 grams [of mephedrone].

“He wanted to be convicted as soon as possible because he wanted to fight, and that was only possible after the verdict,” the lawyer explained.

“His parents really did not want this, because they were against the war. My wife explained there’s no guarantee he’d be an artilleryman and he’d be easily thrown on the front lines for nothing. But he was sure everything would be fine. He received almost the most lenient possible punishment – seven years, again. But he left to fight, and now he’s still there. Often, not even two months pass before they return as cargo [in a coffin]. But it seems he’s better off in the army than at freedom.”

The lawyer added that the recruitment for contract soldiers follows the same patterns as recruitment for treasure-men, “and the same guys fall for both”.

Meanwhile, Torchebus is still recovering in hospital.

“In the chats and comments [on my blog], many people judge me, my choice, believing that it would have been better to stay in prison,” he said.

“I don’t believe them, because they would have done the same as me.”

Niko Vorobyov is a freelance journalist and the author of Dopeworld.