Scraping the bottom of the borscht barrel to avoid having to draft middle class Russians into the currently failing war effort against Ukraine, Putin’s top goon Yevgeny Prigozhin has been recruiting violent convicts from prison camps in the Urals to fill the ranks of the Wagner mercenary group, signing up several serial killers and at least one cannibal, the Daily Beast reports.

“Putin’s plan is to recruit at least 50,000 convicts and Prigozhin, who is an ex-convict himself, has already sent more than 3,000,” said Russian prison expert Olga Romanova, who has analyzed videos of Prigozhin personally signing up the dregs of the gulags. The convicts have not fared too well on first contact with the Sunflowers. “Pretty much all murderers we have on our watch have been recruited and they die like flies in Ukraine. Out of the first 42 convicts recruited in the first group, only three survived, out of the second group of 66 convicts, only six returned, including one who had lost his arm,” said Romanova. “We are not a battalion, we are just a bunch of people. Wagner took us… showed us what to do but you cannot learn in one week,” said one convict captured by the Ukrainians whom Romanova had worked with in the past.

Prigozhin, also known as “Putin’s chef” should be a familiar character to the veterans of the digital wars of the early Trump era, as he was the “mastermind” behind the “Internet Research Agency” troll farm which flooded American websites with poorly spelled right wing propaganda.