“I ran out of the dugout just in time to see the convict chasing a soldier with an axe”: Russian servicemen on the army’s degradation

RU

The names of those interviewed have been changed for their safety

Even pro-Kremlin bloggers and so-called “war correspondents” (1, 2, 3) are criticizing the state of the Russian army in Ukraine. They openly accuse commanders of incompetence and call many of the “volunteers” unfit for service. The closer one gets to the front, the more brutal the atmosphere becomes. Reports of drunken fights, hazing, and torture are piling up.

Command incompetence

The problems in the Russian army start at the top — at the junction between senior and mid-level leadership. “For the top brass, the only thing that matters is achieving objectives: pushing forward on a sector or holding ground somewhere. How mid-level managers — meaning the lower-ranking commanders — accomplish that is their problem,” says Igor, a former staff officer.

One public example: the assault by Russian marines who advanced under red flags straight through a minefield, a move that shocked even the pro-war community. Another: troops assembled for a “motivational speech” by former Lieutenant General Akhmedov, at which point Ukrainian forces struck them with a HIMARS missile.

Igor was drafted in the spring of 2021 and was immediately assigned to a battalion staff position. “They opened my personnel file, saw that I had an IT degree, and said, ‘You’ll be a staff guy.’ De facto, I held a staff position equivalent to a sergeant’s rank, but de jure, I was listed as a combat soldier — a gun crew member,” he explains.

When the war began, Igor continued performing “paper-pusher” tasks, only now in Ukraine — first in Donetsk region, and later in the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions. He handled all the battalion’s paperwork and recorded minutes from command staff meetings. “The meetings were held nearly every day. They mostly discussed tactics, but they didn’t even trust each other,” he says. Igor soon experienced the “efficiency” of those commanders’ decisions firsthand when he was sent on a combat mission.

“There was zero coordination. My direct commander just didn’t show up — he lied that he had other tasks and vanished. We came under artillery fire, and I got hit with shrapnel. One piece struck my side, another hit my arm. I crawled into cover and started gnawing the shard out of my arm.”

Another interviewee, Svyatoslav, a convict who signed a military contract, also describes how commanders disappear or refuse to take part in combat operations, leaving their troops stranded at the front. Svyatoslav was sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession and distribution of drugs. A few months after his sentencing, he was sent to fight in the Donetsk Region.

“There were 100 of us during the combat prep stage. Only two survived. The mission was a death trap. Everything was mined, and there were no friendly forces there — though we were told they were in place and waiting for us. We just arrived, dug in, and were hit by drones. No one came to help. We tried calling for support over the radio, but they ignored us. I was literally stepping over the corpses of the same guys I trained with when we were moving in — and stepping over them again when I ran back,” Svyatoslav says.

Two of his fellow soldiers climbed out to see if there was any water left in the neighboring trenches. They stepped on a mine:

“I decided to follow them — there was no point staying alone. Then I saw one of them blown to pieces, and the other — my friend — had part of his face torn off. He went blind instantly, and I knew it was over. I ran back to the trench and stayed there, waiting for it to be completely destroyed. My friend screamed for three or four hours before dying. I was nearby the whole time and heard everything.”

Junior Lieutenant Yevgeny says the negligent treatment of personnel is the result not only of poor tactical decisions, but also of a lack of qualified officers:

“It’s all parade-ground types and desk jockeys. There are some combat-experienced ones, but those are either butchers, like Ksenofontov, or decent people — and the decent ones usually get wiped out, because no one needs someone who asks too many questions. Battalion commanders, for example, always stay in the rear — you can’t drag them to the front. And if a company commander is decent and tries to protect his people, he’s not allowed to think for himself. Officers don’t have much choice: either follow the idiotic orders from above — meaning those of the battalion commanders and higher, who don’t know a damn thing — or end up in Zaitsevo,” he says.

Sergey, who miraculously survived the assault near Klishchiivka in 2023 and previously fought in the Second Chechen War, recalls that during his time in Ukraine, he could count the number of officers with professional military training on one hand — and even those weren’t particularly sharp:

“Our battalion commander was the only career officer. The rest were from other security agencies, with no real military background. But even that commander was a complete idiot. First off, he was a tank officer, not infantry. Second, he was drunk all the time — I never saw him sober. So yeah, he was a career officer — permanently drunk and utterly useless.”

According to junior lieutenant Yevgeny, it’s possible to get promoted even without a professional background:

“The trained officers are running out. Now you can easily rise to the rank of major, even to battalion commander. It’s not about professionalism — it’s about loyalty. No one cares about your skills.”

Straight to a penal battalion

Some officers try to resist and end up in assault units. “At the academy, we officers were trained not to express our opinions or ask questions. I started to notice that I couldn’t make any decisions on my own — I was just waiting for someone to assign me a task so I could carry it out. Do you understand how brain-dead I’d become?” says senior lieutenant Denis, a graduate of the Military Communications Academy.

“There wasn’t so much discipline as there was a mandate to make everyone the same — the goal was to kill any trace of personality. We weren’t allowed to show initiative, express ourselves, or think,” he recalls.

At the start of the war, Denis tried to avoid deployment because he didn’t want to “become a witness to, let alone a participant in, various war crimes,” but in January 2023 he was sent to Kherson region. “They told me I’d only be documenting destroyed equipment, so I went.”

But beyond paperwork, Denis also had to command a platoon — including sending contract soldiers under his command on combat missions. However, the former officer says he refused to do so and was repeatedly reprimanded — even threatened:

“A ‘meat grinder assault’ was about to be launched, and my unit was told: ‘You have to complete the task in such-and-such location.’ But I wouldn’t send my soldiers. I said I was handling the write-off of equipment and wasn’t sending my signals platoon — my personnel — anywhere. They yelled at me for it, summoned me to meetings, sometimes even said, ‘Let’s go have a talk one-on-one.’ Other platoons obeyed and carried out whatever the commanders ordered — like, if they were told to drive a tank over and destroy a building, they drove the tank over and destroyed it.”

Eventually, Denis deserted: “I asked a friend from another unit to drive me, and that’s how I got back to Russia. I didn’t show up for duty. There was no one at the permanent deployment base. Everyone was in Ukraine.”

In April 2023, military police came to Denis and tricked him into going with them to see his commanding officer. He ended up being taken to Russian-occupied Crimea: “They said they had a combat order to deliver me to the unit to see the division commander. The key phrase was ‘deliver to the unit,’ so I agreed to go. Then I look around, and we’re already driving out of the city.” Any objections were met with a clear response from the military police: ask questions, and you’ll be cuffed or beaten. “We stopped to refuel in Dzhankoy [in Crimea]. I started yelling loudly so that someone at the gas station might hear me. Eventually, a man approached the senior lieutenant and started questioning him. They opened the van. I tried to break free, and they cuffed me to the bars,” Denis recalls.

When the handcuffs were removed at the command post, he lunged at the division commander. He was left in Dzhankoy until March 2024, when he was transferred to an RCB defense brigade in Yekaterinburg, which he was told was a rear unit. However, when he arrived, Denis learned he was being sent back to Ukraine. He said he wasn’t going anywhere, stopped attending roll calls, and only showed up for guard duty and briefings: “At the briefings, they told me they’d break my legs for disagreeing with command: ‘Why are you talking back? We can break your legs’ — just like that.”

A month later, the officer received an order for a new assignment — he was being transferred to a new assault regiment that was still in the process of being formed. Denis says he filed complaints with the prosecutor’s office, but no one responded, and he was forced to go. Upon arrival at the unit, he said he would not assume the position. “I called the colonel who had issued the order and told him I didn’t agree with the transfer or the appointment, that I had the right to refuse — especially since the new post was not equivalent, but higher. And he says, ‘You don’t have any rights. You’re a slave — sit still and don’t ask unnecessary questions.’”

A few days after that conversation, The Insider’s source left the unit and never returned.

Breakdown of discipline, brawls, drunken fights

Still, many soldiers choose a different path: numbing themselves with alcohol and drugs (1,2).

“It’s a really tense environment, and when you’re constantly stuck in it, you lose your grip. To unwind and let off steam, people start doing insane things — drinking, shooting, running around with a rifle — just to get a fleeting high,” explains Lieutenant Mikhail.

Mikhail began serving in 2020, right after graduating from a military training center at a civilian university. “I enlisted because I wanted to be in the military, but as early as after my first year I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. In my third year I tried to drop out, but they talked me out of it and said, ‘Just finish, and when you get to the army, you can resign.’ But that turned out to be a lie. When I submitted my resignation, they told me, ‘We’re not letting you go. You’ll serve to the end.’”

As a platoon commander in a division HQ unit, Mikhail was assigned responsibility for conscripts and contract sergeants, along with broken-down equipment that was used to blackmail him:

“All the equipment was Soviet-era, outdated, falling apart. They assigned me a BMP that had been in storage near Yekaterinburg. A fourth-category BMP, completely trashed. When I went there to write it off, I realized it was impossible, because everything inside — communications gear, navigation equipment — had already been looted, and I couldn’t do anything. But it was worth 23 million [rubles], and they kept threatening me: ‘Don’t get smart, you’ve got that BMP on your list to write off, and if anything goes wrong, we’ll come down on you.’”

Mikhail had no motivation to serve, and working with conscripts was an added challenge: “I tried to run some training sessions, but of course I wasn’t preparing them super well — just as much as I had the energy for. And the equipment was in terrible shape: artillery instruments, reconnaissance gear, mobile vehicles — everything was run-down. There was just nothing to work with.”

The officer served for two years while attempting to deal with the “Soviet relics.” Then, when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he was assigned 30 conscripts and sent to unload ammunition in Kursk Region. Later he was transferred to a warehouse in Voronezh Region, and after mobilization was declared in September 2022, he was deployed to Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine’s Luhansk Region.

“I made it clear to my commander that I didn’t want to shoot, that I had no need for this war. For the most part, I took on staff duties. Sometimes, sure, I had to set up communications, but the platoon assigned to me — I didn’t lead them on combat missions. Other commanders took my people instead,” the former lieutenant explains.

According to Mikhail, both commanders and rank-and-file soldiers gave little thought to what was happening:

“People get their paycheck and don’t want to think about anything. Honestly, they have no moral sense that what they’re doing is wrong.”

And there was a lot of drinking at the front: “They’d send guys to the store — a group would go out, collect everyone’s bank cards, and buy vodka. When commanders started cracking down on it, they began making homebrew right on the spot — from sugar, from whatever mixtures could ferment — I don’t even know what they were using, but it was some kind of swill.”

These “gatherings,” the officer notes, often ended in fights:

“When soldiers were caught drunk, they were beaten — but it didn’t help. Only when they were sent to assaults or thrown into pits. Commanders drank too. There were times when the chief of staff got drunk and started firing his weapon randomly. Luckily, no one was killed.”

Senior Lieutenant Denis confirms this: “Both soldiers and commanders drank. Drugs were freely available. Weed was basically like saying ‘good morning.’ Under the influence of alcohol, they’d grab rifles — an AKS-74U, for example — and start shooting. I witnessed a warrant officer pick up a rifle and start firing inside a dugout. He nearly shot a mobilized soldier. Just a few centimeters more and he would’ve killed him.”

Sergey, a veteran of the Chechen campaign who was later mobilized, recalls how constant drinking fueled chaos:

“There was no discipline because the men were drinking. One day they’d be drunk, the next they’d go to the front like cattle, led by a rope. Discipline among the contract soldiers was even worse. They came expecting to make money after hearing propaganda, but when the evacuation started, they were in shock. Not only were most of them killed on the first assault — only 15 to 20 percent survived — but they didn’t even understand what was happening.”

Mikhail says things got even harder once former prisoners joined the ranks:

“There were fights. I had a convict under my command who was a real headache. He kept running around shouting, ‘I want to shoot! I want to shoot!’ But we needed to keep quiet to avoid detection. One day, he grabbed an axe and almost killed one of my contract soldiers. The convict said something in prison slang, and the soldier mocked him, calling him a ‘low-ranking inmate,’ which hit a nerve. I ran out of the dugout just in time to see the convict chasing the soldier with the axe — he was about to grab a rifle. Luckily, we disarmed him and locked him in a pit for three days. After that, he never pulled a stunt like that again.”

Some prisoners tried to impose their own rules, showing that “they were in charge here and the commander’s word was worthless.” One such incident ended in a junior officer’s death.

“A prisoner shot a warrant officer — the platoon commander of a reactive artillery support unit. The warrant officer said something wrong, and the prisoner shot him. They’d been drinking and arguing, and then the prisoner took a rifle and shot him in the stomach. They immediately restrained the prisoner and killed him on the spot, but the warrant officer didn’t survive,” Mikhail recounts.

“Prison swagger was always around, but now it’s really come to the surface. It’s all ‘I’m the shot-caller, you’re nobody. I get to throw up the signs, you keep your hands in your pockets,’” Denis says.

War crimes and crackdowns within the ranks

From the first days of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army has been accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. These include the murder and torture of civilians, forced transfers — in effect, abductions — of the civilian population, rape, looting, and the destruction of cultural heritage sites. According to the UN, 95% of Ukrainian prisoners have been subjected to torture and beatings.

“I had to travel to other units — to the infantry, among others — for paperwork, and whenever I got there, I saw prisoners. They were tied to trees and left out in the cold. They were being beaten, tortured — people were really being maimed, abused,” says officer Mikhail.

He says both enlisted soldiers and commanders viewed Ukrainians as less than human: “The people I talked to would say, ‘We should’ve just shot them right here.’ Their attitude was extremely brutal. They didn’t think Ukrainians deserved to be prisoners. They thought they should be killed on the spot. I don’t know whether they actually did it — I didn’t witness it myself — but the commanders shared that view.”

Among the widely reported atrocities are the execution of soldier Oleksandr Matsievskyi after he said “Glory to Ukraine!”, the killing of prisoners near Kazachya Lopan in the Kursk Region, and the murder of a Ukrainian serviceman with a sword. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office has opened pre-trial investigations into 57 criminal cases concerning the killings of over 196 Ukrainian prisoners of war by Russian forces.

The same methods are used by Russian commanders against Russian servicemen themselves. Soldiers who refuse to go on assaults, who get drunk, or who disobey orders in any way are beaten or thrown into pits.

“People were beaten for any misstep, thrown into pits — brutally, almost to the point of death. That was standard. They’d lock someone up for five days with no food, out in the cold. Everyone got the message fast — they’d crawl out saying, ‘Okay, I’ll do whatever you want.’ And if no one wanted to bother dealing with them, they’d just hand them off to Storm units,” says Mikhail.

These punishments were meant to send a clear signal, he explains: “They’d drag a guy off, tie him up, beat him bloody, then untie him and march him back so that everyone could see. It was a warning: this is what happens if you don’t fall in line.”

The violence often started even before units arrived on the front lines. Former convict Svyatoslav recalls that during “training,” even minor mistakes earned a rifle butt to the head, while more serious ones led to savage beatings.

“They went after guys who struggled to keep up. The instructors were combat soldiers just back from the front — angry, bitter. They took it out on us. If you didn’t shoot straight during practice, they’d just grab a rifle and smash you over the head.”

Public beatings were also used as a means of intimidation to other soldiers. “They’d haul someone out in front of the unit and beat him in full view. Then came the threats: ‘We’ll make you disappear, and no one will ever know.’ They’d write it off as MIA. They would hit people with anything — fists, boots, rifles. It didn’t happen to me, but I saw it with my own eyes,” the former inmate says.