A Russian Army Convict Says "We Are Not Human To Them"
The New York Times Post
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Aleksandr said he had enlisted in March, shortly after receiving a long prison term for homicide in central Russia. He left at home a wife, a daughter, and a newborn son, and was worried that he would not survive the torture and extortions in his jail.
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Like other inmate fighters, he was promised a monthly salary of $2,000 at today’s exchange rate, and freedom at the end of his six-month contract, a copy of which he shared with The Times.
Wagner claims that 49,000 inmates fought for its force in Ukraine and that 20 percent of them died. Former fighters have described brutal disciplinary measures imposed by the paramilitary group.
However, Wagner survivors have also broadly said that they were able to collect wages and return home after six months as free men. To lift the recruitment numbers, Wagner also worked to rehabilitate the inmates in the eyes of Russian society, presenting their military service as a patriotic redemption.
Yet by February, Wagner had lost access to prisons during a power struggle with the military high command, allowing the Defense Ministry to supplant them in terms of recruiting convicts.
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People in uniform with weapons and equipment on a military vehicle.
Fighters with the Wagner mercenary group in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, in June. Of the 49,000 inmates that have fought for the group in Ukraine, Wagner says that 20 percent have died. Credit...Reuters
The size of the Russian army’s own inmate units and their casualty rates are unknown. However, a tally of the country’s war deaths collected by the BBC and Mediazona, an independent news outlet, shows that inmates became the most frequent Russian casualties starting this spring, underlining the oversize contribution they have made to the country’s war effort.
The testimony of Aleksandr and three other former inmates shows how convict units have evolved under the direct control of the Russian Army. The Times obtained Aleksandr’s contact information through a Russian rights activist, Yana Gelmel, and verified his and other inmates’ identities using publicly available court records and interviews with their relatives and friends.
They have described irregular wage payments that fell far short of the amounts promised to them by the state and an inability to collect compensation for injuries. Aleksandr also said that his officers had explicitly prevented men in his unit from collecting dead comrades from the battlefield.
He claimed that this was done to prevent their families from claiming compensation, because the dead soldiers would be registered as missing rather than as killed in action.
“There were bodies everywhere,” Aleksandr said, describing the fighting on the banks of the Dnipro River in May. “No one was interested in collecting them.”
Russia’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
Aleksandr also claimed that his officers used threats and intimidation to force surviving inmates to remain at the front for another year after the end of their contracts. Another inmate soldier currently serving on the Zaporizhzhia front further east said that his contract had obliged him to remain in Ukraine for an additional year after obtaining his pardon, this time as a professional soldier.
All inmates spoke of colossal casualties in their units and of their commanders’ seeming disregard for their lives.
“Every day, we live like on top of a powder barrel,” Aleksandr said. “They tell us, ‘You are nobodies, and your name is nothing.’”
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Ukrainian soldiers in combat fatigues crouch in a trench.
A Ukrainian mortar team fired toward a Russian trench position near Niu-York, Ukraine, last month.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
After a month of training near the occupied city of Luhansk, Aleksandr said he was sent with his unit to hold a line of former holiday homes near the Antonovskiy Bridge, an area that Ukraine has been targeting with hit-and-run attacks since Russia’s forces withdrew to the east bank of the Dnipro in November.
They spent the next three and a half weeks under constant bombardment from the invisible enemy, who shelled their exposed positions from across the river and targeted them with snipers and night ambushes. Enemy drones constantly hovered in the air.
The aim of their mission was unclear to them; they were told to simply remain in their positions. They had no heavy weapons and no means to defend themselves against Ukrainian attacks.
“I’m running around with an automatic gun like an idiot. I haven’t made a single shot, I haven’t seen a single enemy,” a former inmate from Aleksandr’s unit named Dmitri, who is now deceased, said in a voice message at the time. “We are just baited to expose their artillery positions.” The message was shared with The Times by Dmitri’s wife.
“Why the hell do I need to be here? To sit around and shake like a rabbit because shells keep on exploding all around you?” Dmitri said in one of the messages.
Aleksandr said his unit had been left without food and water for days after asking their commanders to be relieved, forcing them to scavenge for ration biscuits and drink rainwater treated with chlorine.
In late May, Aleksandr was sent on a mission to mine a riverbank. His unit was hit by a Ukrainian howitzer shell, which detonated nearby mines.
All of the other men in his detachment died instantly, he said; Aleksandr was injured.
“It was raining, and I fell into a puddle,” he said, describing the attack. “I crawled away bit by bit and then covered myself with some rubble because I knew they would finish me off.” He said he had managed to send text messages to his unit before losing consciousness.
The next day, he was dragged out by his comrades and evacuated to a hospital in Crimea. Though he still couldn’t walk well, he was sent back to the front line, before being put in a hut in the rear with other convalescing fighters.
“It’s so scary to remain here,” Aleksandr said. “This is not our war. There’s nothing human here.”
Oleg Matsnev and Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.
Anatoly Kurmanaev is a foreign correspondent covering Russia’s transformation after its invasion of Ukraine. More about Anatoly Kurmanaev
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