Short of soldiers and facing battlefield setbacks, Russia appears to be turning to convicted criminals to fight in Ukraine. 

A private military company is recruiting prisoners to be sent to the front lines in an effort to bolster Russian President Vladimir Putin’s faltering invasion, according to Western military analysts and a new video that appears to show the group’s recruiting pitch. 

Footage emerged this week of what appears to be Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch and the reputed financier of the Wagner mercenaries group. He has previously denied links to the group, whose mercenaries have been fighting in Ukraine and have been deployed by the Kremlin in places such as Syria and Sudan, analysts say.

The video posted to Russian social media sites shows a man with the voice and likeness of Prigozhin addressing a large group of prisoners, all wearing navy-colored uniforms and assembled in what appears to be a concrete yard. He tells them that their sentences would be commuted if they served in Ukraine for six months — but that anyone who changes their mind would be shot as a deserter. 

“You won’t be any different from us,” the man in the video tells the prisoners, according to a translation for this article. “I’m taking you out alive. But don’t always return you alive.”

NBC News’ social newsgathering team geolocated the video to a jail in the city of Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of Russia’s central Mari El Republic, about 500 miles east of Moscow. It is unclear when the footage was filmed. It first surfaced this week in Russian Telegram channels and social media accounts, and was shared by opposition activists.

Ukraine’s armed forces have retaken control of huge swaths of land in the past few weeks , as they advanced with the help of precise Western-supplied artillery against what experts said were thin and disorganized Russian defensive lines. 

The counteroffensive led to the discovery of an alleged mass burial site near the crucial city of Izyum, one of many areas from which the Russian retreat has left the Kremlin struggling to respond.

The British defense ministry said Friday that Wagner had been offering prisoners sentence reductions or cash incentives to sign up to fight since at least July. The ministry also said that Russian military academies were shortening training courses so cadets could be deployed sooner. “The impact of Russia’s manpower challenge has become increasingly severe,” it said.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based military think tank, said in a briefing this week that the video showed “Prigozhin is being established as the face of the Russian ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.”

A Russian military blogger “noted that Prigozhin is introducing a ‘Stalinist’ method that allows the Kremlin to avoid ordering a general mobilization that could ignite social tensions in Russian society,” the institute added, referring to the online community of pro-war activists who have been urging the Kremlin to change its approach in the wake of the Ukrainian advances.

“Putin hasn’t so far wanted to go for general mobilization, which would be highly unpopular and could have consequences for the stability of the regime,” said John Lough, an associate fellow and Russia expert at Chatham House, a think tank in London. He said the prisoner recruitment “suggests a level of desperation” on behalf of the Kremlin.

Russian soldiers being sent to the front lines are very badly equipped, poorly prepared and lack the motivation to fight, according to Lough.