44-year-old prisoner Yevgeny Eremenko was buried in Petrozavodsk. According to Mediazona , citing his mother, Eremenko was recruited to participate in the war in Ukraine, where he died during the hostilities.

Eremenko was sentenced in 2020 to 10 years in a strict regime colony in a case of extortion. He served his sentence in the Petrozavodsk IK-9. His mother told the publication that at the end of May he stopped calling her, and in June he called and said that he was being transferred to another region.

On August 14, two men handed Koteneva a death certificate issued by the self-proclaimed LPR. It stated that Eremenko was killed on July 24 in Bakhmut, a Ukrainian-controlled city in the Donetsk region.

Eremenko's body was brought to Petrozavodsk from St. Petersburg on August 18 by a private driver. His mother paid for his delivery herself. According to her mother's friend Marina Gorodilova, after some time she was compensated 145 thousand rubles for the funeral.

One of the convicts and a local lawyer, Ivan Varfolomeev, told Mediazona that prisoners were recruited in the Petrozavodsk IK-9 to be sent to Ukraine. Presumably, this was done by representatives of PMC Wagner, businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Earlier, The Insider found out that the owner of PMC Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, personally recruits prisoners in Russian colonies, offering release in six months for participation in hostilities in Ukraine, the convicts themselves told about this.