The construction of a supercolony in Ulan-Ude is postponed indefinitely, as funding for the project is "not provided," and the colonies have emptied "for understandable reasons," reported the head of Buryatia, Alexey Tsydenov. "For us, the relevance was that our detention centers and colonies in the city center require renovation. And if they are to be renovated, it would be better to make a new one and develop the project," quotes the head of the region "Siberian Express."
Colonies for 3,000 people were planned to be built in Ulan-Ude and Chita by order of Vladimir Putin. Residents of the Ulan-Ude district of Steklozavod protested against the construction in the summer of 2023, gathering 6,000 signatures, and in 2024, the project was moved to another district, receiving new protests.
At the end of February 2024, the Russian government approved the Ministry of Justice's idea of creating so-called hybrid colonies—these are detention centers, the colonies themselves with several types of regimes, rooms for long-term visits of prisoners with relatives, and all accompanying infrastructure. One of these supercolonies was planned to be built in Ulan-Ude, cutting down more than 160 hectares of forest.
Tsydenov did not specify what the "understandable reasons" were, but most likely he meant the recruitment of convicts to the front for the war with Ukraine. The deaths of more than 80,000 Russian soldiers have been confirmed, more than 14,000 of them being former convicts. In 2023, the Federal Penitentiary Service stated that the number of prisoners in Russia decreased by 32,000 people.
In March, the authorities of the Krasnoyarsk Territory reported the closure of two colonies, as most of the prisoners signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense and went to Ukraine.