By Ekaterina Janashia | 2026-05-05

A junior lieutenant tried to assert military authority over a group of convicts in his unit. They shot him.

The soldier, nicknamed "Simka," is one face of a crisis consuming the Russian military from within. Thousands of violent criminals -- murderers, rapists, armed robbers -- recruited directly from prisons into frontline units have imported the gulag's power structure into the trenches. The result is a parallel criminal hierarchy that is bleeding the Russian army of money, discipline, and lives.

The phenomenon has a name: the Organized Thieves' Den, or OVM in Russian. It has a chronicler, too: Sergei Komkov, a pro-war Russian commentator and journalist, who has documented the system in detail.

Extortion starts on arrival

When new contract soldiers arrive at their units, they are met by pakhans -- prison kingpins -- who demand a cut of their sign-on bonuses and monthly salaries. The money flows into a criminal slush fund called the obshchak, which bankrolls a lifestyle of alcohol, drugs and hired women.

"As soon as a new contract soldier arrives in a combat unit, he is immediately 'offered'... to send part of the funds received under the contract to a corresponding bank account," Komkov wrote. "It is practically impossible to disobey. Because it is fraught with serious consequences. Up to and including a bullet in the back."

Komkov calls the scheme a "thieves' carousel." Women are reportedly brought to the front at 20,000 RUB ($220) per hour. Alcohol, he wrote, "literally flows like a river day and night in the dugouts." Some convicts have reportedly left their positions without leave to drive to nearby cities and buy BMWs with extorted funds.

The mass recruitment of prisoners into units like the Stormtrooper-Z (Storm-Z) and Stormtrooper-V (Storm-V) detachments seeded the problem. With Russian law now allowing recruitment at the pre-trial detention stage, the influx shows no sign of slowing.

Officers face the backlash

Simka's killing was not an isolated incident. UN experts have documented a pattern of recruited prisoners threatening, mistreating and in some cases executing superiors who attempt to impose discipline or prevent desertion.

The military legal system has largely failed to respond. Komkov argues that commanders who try to restore order are the ones who end up facing consequences.

"When some battle-hardened commanders made the slightest effort to restore order, they were immediately slapped on the hands by representatives of the military investigation and military prosecutor's office," he said.

Independent Russian outlet Meduza has separately reported cases of Russian officers running clandestine detention facilities for their own soldiers, sometimes framed by the officers themselves as a last resort for managing drug-addicted or insubordinate convicts.

Old hazing, new danger

The Russian military has long struggled with dedovshchina, a hazing system in which senior conscripts abuse junior ones. Soldiers routinely lost wages to stronger peers and endured brutal living conditions. Kontur has previously reported on the connection between these internal dynamics and the high rate of suicide among Russian troops in Ukraine.

But analysts argue the OVM is categorically worse. Dedovshchina was a pathology that grew inside the military. The OVM is a professional criminal underworld that has been deliberately imported into it.

Komkov's verdict is stark. Left unchecked, the system will bring about the "final collapse of the army from within."