Is Russia forcibly sending Uzbek immigrants to war?

A 25-year-old Uzbek citizen who fought against Ukraine as part of the Russian private military company Wagner said he was first imprisoned in the Samara region on drug trafficking charges and then forcibly taken to fight.

According to Gazeta.uz, the Angren City Criminal Court of the Tashkent Region sentenced him to 5 years of restricted freedom.

The defendant said that in September 2022, Prigozhin, the head of the private military company Wagner, and members of the company arrived at the penitentiary No. 26 in the Samara region, where he was serving his sentence. They gathered more than 500 prisoners of Uzbek nationality in the institution (excluding those convicted of terrorism and assault on honor) and told them that if any prisoner was recruited to serve for 6 months in a "special military operation" being conducted on the territory of Ukraine, he would be given 150,000 rubles, Russian citizenship, and amnesty after completing his service.

"After that, we were offered to participate in the Russian-Ukrainian war. At that time, 10-15 convicts said that they did not want to go to war. Representatives of "Wagner" called 3 of them and shot them in front of us. Then they asked the rest who did not want to go to war, and no one refused," the defendant said.