Image Recognition
They are identified as pardoned former convicts, returned from the front in Ukraine after joining Wagner from prison. “You were an offender, now you’re a war hero,” Prigozhin tells one man in the clip. It was the first video to depict the return of some of the thousands of convicts who joined Wagner in return for the promise of a pardon if they survived six months of war. Reuters used facial recognition software to examine this video and more than a dozen other videos and photographs of homecoming convict fighters, published between October 2022 and February 2023. Reporters were able to identify more than 30 of the men by cross-checking the images with social media and Russian court documents.