1/ A Russian soldier fighting near Pokrovsk says that the area is a scene of carnage, with dead Russians lying everywhere. Soldiers' families are being sent death notices even before the men go into assaults. Only four out of his group of 120 men survived one assault.
7/ A few days later he was sent into the battle of Krasnohorivka, in which he was one of the few survivors of a failed assault involving 46 Russian vehicles that were mostly disabled or destroyed by the Ukrainians.
8/ "[O]n 12 September 2024, they took us out, put us in an infantry fighting vehicle, woke us up at one in the morning, put us in bulletproof vests, took our documents, took our phones, put us in the IFV, and sent us off.
9/ "We were driving toward Krasnohorivka, past Krasnohorivka about a kilometer [further]. Between the 10 vehicles, two got away. The rest of us, 120 people, they killed us all. [Our two vehicles] returned."
10/ "The four of us got out. We walked for six days through minefields. Behind Ukrainian lines, they hit us with cluster munitions, they shot at us from dugouts, from every crevice they could. But we got away. Before reaching Krasnohorivka, we ran into our own outpost…
11/ "We gave them our call signs and told them everything that had happened. To which they replied, "We're bringing you ammunition, you understand, extra ammo, grenades, we're sending you four cans of stew, a loaf of bread."
12/ "And they send us back. They say we're sending you back because you didn't complete the task, since we never got there, we were destroyed by drones. It was pure hell there. They mowed us down, I don't know, they didn't even let us raise our heads."
13/ Two of the survivors had crippling injuries and had to be left behind by the two remaining able-bodied survivors, one of whom was the soldier in the video.The man was subsequently sent to fight in the Pokrovsk area, which he says is even worse.
14/ "People shouldn't see this, shouldn't hear this. It was just brutal. They were mowing people down, as if, I don't know, they were walking across a field and just cutting the grass. There are still corpses lying on the roads there, with tanks running over them.
15/ "There are torn bodies, charred bodies. No one is taking them away. Don't believe those who say they are missing in action. That's not true, that's all. They are lying there in the fields because no one is bothering to remove them.
Quaoar--Daily Kos.
Fighting for Russia
He says that the new recruits usually die during their first combat mission. Ruslan describes himself as "a saboteur by trade" (likely a member of a DRG, a sabotage and reconnaissance group). "There are six of us left: there were seventy, now there are six."
5/ He describes how the battlefield is littered with Russian corpses that have not been recovered and are falling apart from decay, or are trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings:
6/ “You drive over corpses—there's no other way. It's like that, you just can't tell who you're driving over... We've got three brigades buried under slabs.
7/ "Those in the basement—they simply can't be pulled out, and those who lived on the first floor—they were all blown to pieces…
8/ "The road of life—it's strewn with corpses, the fields are just littered with them. Why don't they pull them out? They could be pulled out, but even if you wanted to pull them out now, they're all falling apart. You pull on his leg, and the leg comes off."
9/ According to Ruslan, his commanders have banned the men from collecting documents from fallen soldiers, because so many have been killed that it's too expensive to pay their relatives compensation for their deaths:
10/ "We used to go out and collect documents. Not corpses, but documents. Then we would bring them to the battalion commander and hand them over. Later, we were forbidden from doing this because it wasn't profitable for the Ministry of Defence…
11/ "Personally, when I had time, I would collect 70–80 military ID cards a day. Imagine that, in a single day. Just imagine — that's millions [of rubles in compensation], and there were about fifteen of us...
quaoar -- Daily Kos
Russian troops handcuffed to trees and left for dead after defying orders
Footage from key battle zone in Donetsk is latest evidence of Moscow’s brutal treatment of its fighte
