Lawfare Daily: Emily Hoge on Russian Mobsters at the Front
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Benjamin Wittes sits down with Emily Hoge, a historian at Clemson University, who has written a pair of pieces for Lawfare recently about Russian mobsters and the war in Ukraine. They’re getting out of prison in exchange for service at the front. Some of them are surviving their service there and returning home by way of reward—and the Russian crime rate is skyrocketing as a result. Is all of this altering the Russian social contract, which promised to make the violence of the 1990s a thing of the past in exchange to submission to Vladimir Putin’s rule?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Nearly every news alert in 2025 has raised questions, some old, some new, about the law and national security. |
| 0:08.0 | And now you get the chance to ask Lawfare directly. It's time for our annual Ask Us Anything Mailbag podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare this year's most burning questions. |
| 0:19.0 | You can submit your question by leaving a voicemail at |
| 0:22.1 | 202-643-8474 or by sending a recording of yourself asking your question to Ask Us Anything Lawfare |
| 0:32.8 | at gmail.com by December 16th. |
| 0:43.2 | Yeah, it's sort of people acting with a sense of total impunity who go on to commit some fairly heinous violent crimes who've gone through prison, which is Russian prisons are |
| 0:49.2 | quite brutal, then sent to a war where they are further brutalized, where they are often |
| 0:53.4 | encouraged to commit war crimes, where they are participating brutalized, where they are often encouraged to commit |
| 0:54.5 | war crimes, where they are participating in a great deal of violence, and then they come home |
| 0:59.3 | with a sense of total impunity for crimes that they commit. It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm |
| 1:05.4 | Benjamin Wittes with Emily Hogue of Clemson University. |
| 1:18.1 | It seems like hearts of the way that organized crime relates to the state are starting to change as the state is able to offer less and is asking more of them continuously. |
| 1:23.6 | Today we're talking Russian mobsters. What are they doing at the front in Ukraine? What happens when they get out of prison and come home to Moscow after serving their time at the front? How is this affecting the murder rate in Moscow? And are there mobsters who are too violent, even for Vladimir Putin, |
| 1:47.5 | to let out of prison in exchange for service in the war against Ukraine? I want to start with the |
| 1:57.0 | text of these two articles that you wrote for lawfare, one in August and one last month. |
| 2:04.2 | But I want to actually go into what I think is a deeper subtext of both of these articles |
| 2:13.4 | and a kind of thesis that you're playing with relatively quickly. And so let's start with the first |
| 2:20.2 | article. I think just to get everybody on the same page, the first article has to do with letting |
| 2:27.3 | people out of prison, pardoning them in Russia so that they can go kill Ukrainians. Talk me through what's going on in that article |
| 2:38.6 | and what you reported. So in that article, I was looking at sort of the use of prisoners in the |
| 2:47.1 | war as a way of kind of making the war invisible, that prisoners are sort of an available, |
| 2:53.3 | vulnerable population that the Russian state can kind of draw on to avoid a mass conscription, |
... |
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