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In early February 2026, the Main State Expert Review Board of the Russian Federation issued a positive opinion on the project to build a 4,000-capacity pre-trial detention centre in the Solnechnogorsk urban district of the Moscow region. The customer for the construction is the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) of Russia, and funding will be provided under the 2026 Federal Target Programme. The project documentation was prepared by A-Proekt.K LLC. It is noteworthy that this project was twice rejected by the Main State Expert Review Board — on 13 March and 7 August 2025 — but was eventually approved after revisions. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2026 and be completed in 2032.
The isolation facility will be located near the 71st kilometre of the M-11 motorway, between the villages of Shapkino and Ozhogino, on a 42.7-hectare plot of land. The complex of buildings with a total area of almost 140,000 square metres will be divided into local, restricted and utility and storage areas. The restricted access zone will have six buildings for men, one for women, as well as separate buildings for individuals with so-called ‘negative tendencies’ and those suffering from tuberculosis. The new detention centre is planned to hold 3,020 men, 400 women (including 24 women with children), 20 minors, 100 persons of ‘negative orientation,’ 68 persons with tuberculosis, up to 12 persons sentenced to life imprisonment, 100 defendants in transit, and up to 280 convicts assigned to maintenance work. The tender for design and survey work was held in March 2023, with the initial design cost estimated at 191 million roubles, but the contract was awarded for 91 million; at the same time, the contractor paid more than 8.5 million roubles in penalties for delays in completion.
The decision to build a new large-scale detention centre should be viewed in the context of general trends in the Russian Federation’s prison system and its connection to the aggressive war against Ukraine. According to World Prison Brief data, Russia’s prison population has shown a steady downward trend over the past two decades: from 1,060,404 people in 2000 (729 per 100,000 population) to 465,896 people in 2022 (322 per 100,000 population).
As of 1 January 2023, the total number of prisoners was 433,006, with an official capacity of 714,253 places in the prison system, i.e. the occupancy rate was only 67%.
Russia had 872 penitentiary institutions, of which 204 were pre-trial detention centres (SIZO), 642 were correctional colonies, 8 were prisons, and 18 were educational colonies for minors.
However, the decline in Russia’s prison population, which Kremlin propaganda tried to present as the result of the ‘humanisation’ of criminal justice, is in fact an artificial trend that has nothing to do with the penitentiary policy of a democratic state. The large-scale ‘emptying’ of Russian prisons was a direct consequence of the recruitment of prisoners to participate in the war against Ukraine. According to a joint investigation by Mediazona and BBC Russian Service (June 2024), the private military company Wagner recruited at least 48,366 people directly from places of detention.
According to estimates by the Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service, the total number of convicted prisoners recruited could have been between 140,000 and 180,000.
The Washington Post, citing government statistics and human rights activists, reported that up to 100,000 prisoners had been released and sent to fight.
According to the British Ministry of Defence (March 2023), about half of the prisoners recruited by Wagner were killed or wounded in Ukraine.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) noted in February 2025 that Russia had virtually exhausted its prison population in 2022–2023 and could no longer generate significant forces from among prisoners.
Thus, the decline in Russia’s prison population is not the result of progressive reforms, but the bloody consequence of using prisoners as ‘cannon fodder’ in the war against Ukraine. Thousands of Russian convicts have been killed on the front lines, particularly during the assaults on Bakhmut, where Wagner convict recruits were used as shock troops in wave attacks against Ukrainian positions. Under the Wagner model, convicts who survived six months of service on the front lines were granted pardons. Many of these released individuals are dangerous criminals, and their return to society is already causing serious concern about an increase in recidivism.
On the other hand, despite the deaths of thousands of prisoners on the front lines, the Russian regime clearly needs new places for its growing prison population.
The construction of a giant 4,000-capacity detention centre in the Moscow region is compelling evidence that the Kremlin leadership is forecasting a significant increase in the number of people held in custody. This forecast is confirmed by several key factors.
First, according to a statement by the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service (March 2025), the number of foreign citizens in the Russian prison system exceeded 30,000, with the majority of them being citizens of CIS countries. Back in December 2023, Russian Minister of Justice Konstantin Chuychenko called this situation ‘a very big problem.’
Second, the return of tens of thousands of pardoned convicts who participated in hostilities to civilian life will inevitably generate a new wave of crime and, accordingly, new prisoners.
Third, the intensification of political repression in Russia — criminal prosecution for ‘discrediting’ the armed forces, for anti-war statements, for ‘fakes’ about the army — creates a constant stream of new political prisoners.
The construction of a new pre-trial detention centre in Solnechnogorsk is also an indicator of the further incarceration of Russian society — a process in which prison logic is increasingly penetrating all spheres of public life. Russia historically remains one of the countries with the highest incarceration rates in the world. Even after the ‘decline’ in the prison population, the rate of 300 people per 100,000 population (World Prison Brief data for early 2023) is many times higher than the median rate for Western European countries (73 per 100,000). According to World Prison Brief data, at the time of the last measurement, Russia’s prison system had an official capacity of 714,253 places, with an actual occupancy rate of only 67%. Nevertheless, instead of using the existing capacity, the state is initiating the construction of a new huge detention centre. This indicates that the authorities expect a large-scale increase in the number of inmates, i.e. persons who are in custody pending trial, which is an indicator of the strengthening of the repressive apparatus.
It should be noted that on 1 January 2023, the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia stopped publishing official statistics on the prison population. The publication of official police crime statistics was also banned. This lack of transparency is a characteristic feature of an authoritarian regime that is trying to hide the real scale of repression and the consequences of using prisoners as cannon fodder.
The independent media outlet Mediazona reported that the Federal Penitentiary Service announced a 17.5% reduction in the prison population since the beginning of 2023, which led to the preparation of a draft order on the possible liquidation of several penitentiary institutions. However, as evidenced by the construction of a new pre-trial detention centre, this trend is temporary, and the regime is preparing for a new wave of mass arrests.
In general, the decision to build one of the largest pre-trial detention centres in Russia against the backdrop of the ongoing war against Ukraine and the mass deaths of prisoners on the front lines is yet another eloquent testimony to the prison-like nature of the Russian state. The regime, which, on the one hand, sends tens of thousands of convicts to their deaths in a foreign country and, on the other, builds new giant detention centres for future victims of repression, demonstrates the profound essence of the Russian imperial project, in which prison has always remained one of the key instruments of social control. The incarceration of Russian society is not diminishing — it is only changing forms, moving from mass imprisonment to mass murder of prisoners of war, and then back to mass imprisonment.
