The international delegation, headed by Ana Lucía Bueno, ICRC Public Health Coordinator, and Sujit Panda, Head of the Physical Rehabilitation…
Ukrainian servicemembers captured a Russian soldier who spoke about the critical state of units in the Russian Federation. According to him, former prisoners are used as “cannon fodder”, and the only chance to survive is self-mutilation or injury.
This is stated in a video of the prisoner’s interrogation published on the page of the 18th Sloviansk Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine.
“From our own army”
The prisoner said that most of his unit was formed from people taken from prisons and sent to the front line. When asked what they were fleeing from, he answered directly: “From our Russian army”.
According to him, the real picture at the positions is massive losses and a complete lack of training: “Just meat. You walk through the forest — it’s all our guys”.
“The plan — to get wounded and go”
The prisoner admitted that no combat missions in the classical sense were explained to them. Instead, among themselves they talked about the only way to survive: “There was a plan. Get wounded — and go to Russia to a hospital”.
When asked whether it was possible to return from that section of the front without being wounded, he replied briefly: “There’s no way back from here”.
This is not the first testimony from captured Russian soldiers about the practice of using mobilized troops and those recruited from places of detention as expendable resources. Such confessions are regularly recorded by Ukrainian units on various sections of the front.
