 A former Russian police chief has been killed in Ukraine fighting alongside convicts after swapping a jail sentence for military service Igor Trifonov, the former head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Ekaterinburg Department, was killed while fighting in Ukraine with Russia's military at the end of 2023, his lawyer, Olga Kazik, told Russian newspaper Comrzant.in 2022. He was jailed for nine years and four months in a maximum security prison on charges of bribe-taking and illegal possession of weapons, but was released in late 2023 to fight in Ukraine. The Kremlin has recruited tens of thousands of prisoners since the full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine began in February 2022, offering them presidential pardons for six months of military service in Ukraine. The convicts have largely been deployed as part of Russia's Stormzy squads, which carry out highly attritional, infantry-led frontal assaults at the most dangerous parts of the battlefield.