Ukraine Goes Dirty Dozen with a Twist

Ukraine’s ground war with Russia is a charnel house that requires something like 30,000 new/returning recruits every month to keep the trenches semi-full. It is a war that has always been a numbers game. An innovative method that the troop-poor country is turning to is the old enlisting prisoners bit, be it from among civilian or military inmate populations. You know, the whole Dirty Dozen thing. It is something that is actually pretty common in Soviet military history, with the Shtrafbat Penal Units of the Great Patriotic War being infamous. During that conflict, no less than 65 independent criminal battalions and 1,028 penal companies were established; however, pardons generally only came after being too wounded to fight any more, with the bonus of being sent to a regular infantry unit on the front once/if you healed, so there is that. Of the more than 427,000 who served in Soviet punishment units during the war, very few were still standing in 1946, and even those lucky bastards…