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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