“The CO picked a bunch of nationalists and set up a punishment squad”: The Russian army’s gulag-style methods of abuse

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“Reprimands work on soldiers, but convicted murderers don't care”

Nikolai (the name has been changed at the interviewee's request) is a career officer in the Russian military. He had less than a year left until retirement in Sept. 2022, when Vladimir Putin announced “partial” mobilization, making all military service contracts indefinite. In the spring of 2023, Nikolai and many other officers were transferred into one of Russia’s two new combined arms armies. He tried rejecting the transfer, got into a fight with the unit commander, and almost got himself arrested by the military police. Under the law, members of the Russian military can be transferred to a post of the same rank without their consent, so Nikolai had to follow orders and change the place of his service. Soon, as a company commander, he had his first encounter with fighters recruited from prisons.

Almost every day, twenty or so “volunteers” arrived at his military base with the promise that their criminal records would be expunged. With time, convicted murderers, child molesters, and other hardened felons came to make up the majority of the battalion.

“Inmates are impossible to control. For the first time I saw that such an attitude was possible in the army, and it terrified me,” Nikolai explains. “Volunteers” rebelled, refused to follow orders or to attend roll calls, drank alcohol at any time of day, and got into brawls with each other.

“I’ve never laid a hand on a serviceman, even if he violated army regulations. There are other punishments: extra duty, a written reprimand, or a fine. These methods work on professional servicemen, but a man from the street, especially a convicted murderer, doesn't care,” the officer told The Insider.

Others stepped up to restore order. “The military base commander had an entire assault platoon made up of Chechen and Russian guys at his beck and call,” Nikolai recalls. “He selected the most athletic and well-trained fighters, those who didn't smoke or drink and had a backbone. This group became his ‘punishment squad.’ They had a commander, who took orders from the colonel and relayed them to his subordinates.”

“Punishment squad” members did not waste time on talk. “They entered my company quarters uninvited and grabbed former inmates who stank of booze. If the inmate wasn't too drunk, they beat him up and cuffed him to a radiator. I once saw four drunk ‘volunteers,’ handcuffed and beaten, sitting in the armory. Some were kept like that for 48 hours. No matter who tried to free them, their squad commander or the battalion commander, the punishment squad refused to release them,” Nikolai recounts.

If cuffing a man to a radiator for two days did not produce the desired effect, the culprit was thrown into a pit. “The longest they’ve kept someone captive was three days,” Nikolai says. “Guys returned with bruises and traces of beating. I had one such prisoner in my squad, and there were at least five more in the battalion.”

The colonel used Chechen fighters from the Akhmat special forces unit not only as a punishment squad but also as a security detail. According to Nikolai, they guarded the commander at all times because threats from former inmates were not uncommon:

“You can expect anything from former prisoners — they can easily shoot you in the back. When the deputy commander of our division came to us for inspection, drunk inmates grabbed him and threw him out of the window, laughing: ‘So what are you going to do to us?’ On another occasion, an inmate threatened a battalion officer: ‘Wait till we get to Ukraine, and then we’ll see.’ In other words, he meant he would kill him during combat.”

Pits, basements, and handcuffs

All of the punishments listed by Nikolai are widely used in the Russian army. Minor transgressions are punished by handcuffing an offender or tying him to a tree. In the spring of 2024, air defense battery commander Andrei Eliseenko got into a conflict with his superiors and ended up tied to a tree for four hours — as artillery strikes made impact nearby (he was lucky enough to survive). In the fall of 2023, Gennady Kiskorov, a mobilized soldier from Novokuznetsk, spent several hours tied to a tree after he refused to join the fighting on the frontline in Donetsk Oblast. Kiskorov’s case was reported to the Movement of Conscious Escapists by his brother Semyon, also a mobilized soldier. As the movement informed The Insider, the Kiskorov brothers subsequently went missing in the combat zone.

A more serious type of punishment is confinement in pits. In February 2024, private Artem Polonenko was placed in a pit for filming the aftermath of a missile attack on a firing range near the village of Trudivske, Volnovakha District, and sharing the footage with his acquaintance, who published it online. The strike claimed the lives of at least 65 fighters in the 36th Motorized Brigade (Military Unit 06705).

And journalists are exposing ever more cases of torture in occupied Zaitseve, Luhansk Oblast, where Russian escapists are being illegally detained in a basement. In 2023, the commanders of an occupied military base in Zaporizhzhia locked mobilized soldiers from Regiment 1455 in an overcrowded basement for failure to follow orders by having “one or two drinks.”

Army meets gulag

Army commanders getting someone else to do the “dirty work” of maintaining order is a tradition that goes back to Soviet labor camps. A few years ago, such methods would have been considered a violation of the army regulations and attempting to implement them would have met with strong resistance from officers. Extrajudicial punishments were business as usual only among Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's fighters and in armed formations of the so-called “people's republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, where “people's militia” functioned along the lines of a crime group, recruiting felons years before the Russian army turned to the tactic. In the meantime, career officers in the regular army tried to keep up the customary hierarchy.

Everything changed when Russian forces began actively recruiting convicted criminals, who had little regard for army regulations or routine. By contrast, the principles of so-called “red” prisons, in which the administration “outsources” discipline to a group of trusted inmates, are something they know and understand all too well. Other soldiers found the new order shocking.

Like in prison, in today's Russian army “voluntary helpers” get privileges and benefits. The main bonus is the right to sit out assaults, which greatly improves one’s chances of survival. Unsurprisingly, many are willing to volunteer.

One of the reasons why prison ways stuck so easily is the ongoing practice of “meat-grinder” assaults, in which poorly trained infantry are sent on suicide missions. No one would agree to participate in them willingly, so commanders have to resort to violence.

“We are now faced with a schism inside the Russian army. The core is formed by commanders, specialists, and logistics officers. And the rest of the personnel, the infantry that carries out assaults, are expendable. The first category will do all it takes to get the second category to do their jobs because otherwise commanders and their henchmen would have to bear the brunt of the attack themselves, which they want to avoid, of course. So violence isn't going anywhere anytime soon,” explains Ruslan Leviev, the founder of the Conflict Intelligence Team.

The rear is no better

The practice that emerged on the frontline began to spread beyond the combat zone. Dmitry (the name has been changed at the interviewee's request) escaped from the military unit where he served, first as a conscript, and later as a career officer. In the summer of 2023, his battalion was redeployed from Russia’s Stavropol Krai to the coast of occupied Crimea. Dmitry’s company commander was an officer with the call sign “Joker.”

“He had less regard for army regulation and was less reasonable than other commanders. They said he’d served in Syria. He drank all the time and showed enthusiasm for little else, mostly delegating tasks,” Dmitry recalls. Joker had henchmen, whom Dmitry refers to as “lap dogs.” As he recalls, one was called Alishka, and the other, “Ded” (‘old man’ — Russian military slang for a conscript nearing the end of their military service). Here is how Dmitry describes the recruitment of such aides:

“They were almost always from Chechnya or Dagestan. Most pretended they were Akhmat or ex-Akhmat fighters. Some ordered arm patches with Akhmat’s logo on online marketplaces and used Akhmat lingo in their speech. Meanwhile, Joker, a Russian guy with Nazi tendencies, wore patches with the neopagan spinning wheel [the Slavic analog of the swastika, frequently used by nationalist groups], a black-yellow-and-white nationalist flag, and the caption ‘God is with us.’ So I was surprised that he even spoke with guys from the Caucasus. Their record was not impeccable either: cases of disobeying orders, going AWOL, and so on. That is, Joker selected specifically those averse to following orders, those who detested subordination.”

Since there are no ground hostilities in Crimea, the privileges afforded to Joker's henchmen included the use of a cell phone, permission to go to the village at any time, and permission to drink alcohol. This modest compensation was sufficient for them to punish anyone Joker pointed to.

Dmitry saw how they cuffed his fellow soldier to a tree and threatened him with a gun — for having a few drinks. Joker and his “dogs” intimidated witnesses of the punishment and forbade them from bringing the prisoner water, food, or cigarettes.

“He spent around 24 hours in cuffs until he sobered up. Then they didn’t let him apply antiseptic to his hands afterward. Handcuffs leave cuts on one's wrists. In half an hour, one's hands are blue, and on the next day, they are purple and bleeding. The guy was lucky — had he been kept in cuffs a little longer, they may have slashed his veins.” Dmitry took pity on the guy and poured some antiseptic on his wrists. For his disobedience, the “dogs” “punched him in the gut a few times.”

Joker and his henchmen acted with impunity. “No one reached for their gun or f*cked them up — they were too chickensh*t to do it, probably,” Dmitry recounts. “When they were beating me, I also thought of grabbing my gun, but I was too far away from it. After all, even if you tie your commander to a tree, you’ll have to let him go eventually. And then he’ll take revenge. So the majority decided to keep their heads down.”