Russia had no successful prison escapes in 2022, according to federal authorities

In 2022, for the first time in modern Russia’s history, not a single person successfully escaped from a Russian prison, Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) Director Arkady Gostev said on Monday.

The outlet RBC noted that in August 2022, two convicts briefly managed to escape from a prison in Perm Krai, but they were caught just two days later.

In 2019, the FSIN’s press service reported that over the previous 25 years, the number of successful escapes from Russian prisons had decreased by a factor of 140. According to the agency, there were 140 escapes in 1994, 25 in 2000, 11 in 2010, eight in 2015, and only one in 2018.

In November 2022, the independent outlet Mediazona reported that Russia’s prison population had seen its largest decrease in over a decade since Wagner mercenary group founder Evgeny Prigozhin had begun recruiting prisoners to fight in the war in Ukraine.