IStories: Russian PMC starts recruiting women as snipers, drone operators.

The Borz Batallion of the Russian Defense Ministry-controlled "Private Military Company Redut" had begun recruiting women into its ranks as combat specialists, according to an investigation by the IStories outlet published on Oct.

23. "Initially, we did not have women, only men. Now, we have decided to try out a female sniper squad and a female drone operator squad because women can do it too," the battalion's recruiter with the call sign "Vesta" told an IStories journalist, who was posing as a potential recruit.

"My task as a detachment commander is to prove that women are created not only for soups and children." An advertisement for a six-month contract with the battalion was posted on the Russian social network Vkontakte, offering a salary of 220,000 rubles (£2,300), IStories discovered.

Prigozhin's death latest in a series of unsolved murders in Putin's Russia. What's next?

The death of an opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin is not something new in history. More than 20 critics and opponents of Putin have been murdered or died in suspicious circumstances since 2000. However, the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia's Wagner mercenary group and o...

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in March that 1,100 women were involved in Moscow's war against Ukraine.

Over 39,000 women in total serve in the Russian Armed Forces, almost 5,000 of whom are officers, the minister claimed. However, women are more usually assigned non-combat roles in the military, such as doctors or cooks, IStories noted. Russian independent media reported in July that the Russian Defense Ministry had launched a recruitment campaign to attract women for military service as doctors, nurses, and cooks.

There were some exceptions to this rule, as Moscow has reportedly recruited female prisoners also for battlefield deployment, the Russian NGO "Russia Behind Bars" told IStories in March. Read Also: How Russia's liberal tech companies became the foundation of Putin's war effort

News Editor

Martin Fornusek is a news editor at the Kyiv Independent. He has previously worked as a news content editor at the media company Newsmatics and is a contributor to Euromaidan Press.

He also volunteers as an editor and translator at the Czech-language version of Ukrainer.

Martin studied at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, holding a bachelor's degree in security studies and history and a master's degree in conflict and democracy studies.