Some Russian troops are refusing to fight in Ukraine again because of their experiences on the front lines at the start of the invasion, according to Russian human rights lawyers and activists.
The BBC spoke to one of those soldiers.
“I don’t want to go back (to Ukraine) to kill and be killed,” says Sergey*, who spent five weeks fighting in Ukraine earlier this year.
He is now at home in Russia, having received legal advice to avoid being sent back to the front lines.
Sergey is just one of hundreds of Russian soldiers believed to have sought such advice.
Sergey says he is traumatized by his experience in Ukraine.
“I thought the Russian army was the most powerful in the world,” says the young man bitterly. Instead, we were expected to fight in the Ukraine without basic equipment, such as night vision devices, he notes.
“We were like blind kittens. I’m amazed at our army. It wouldn’t cost much to equip us. Why wasn’t it done?”
Sergey joined the army as a conscript: most Russian men between the ages of 18 and 27 must complete a year of compulsory military service.
But after a few months he made the decision to sign a two-year professional contract that would also give him a salary.
In January, Sergey was sent near the Ukrainian border for, he was told, military exercises.
A month later, on February 24, the day Russia launched its invasion, he was ordered to cross the border. Almost immediately, his unit found itself under attack.
When they stopped for the night at an abandoned farm, their commander told them, “Well, as you may have discovered by now, this is no joke.”
Sergey says that he was completely shocked.
“My first thoughts were ‘Is this really happening? Is this really happening to me?'”
His unit was continually shelled, he says, both when on the move and when stationed overnight.
In his unit of 50 soldiers, 10 were killed and another 10 wounded. Almost all of his classmates were under 25 years old.
Sergey heard that some Russian servicemen were so inexperienced that they “didn’t know how to shoot and couldn’t tell one end of a mortar from the other.”
He says his convoy, traveling through northern Ukraine, came to a standstill after just four days when a bridge they were about to cross blew up, killing his companions in front.
Sergey talks about the trauma of another moment, when he had to go ahead and pass by colleagues trapped inside a burning vehicle.
“His car was blown up by a grenade launcher or something. I didn’t know what it was. The car caught fire and there were (Russian) soldiers inside. We passed him shooting as we went. I didn’t look back.”
His unit advanced through the Ukrainian countryside, but there was a clear lack of strategy, he notes. Reinforcements did not arrive and the soldiers were ill-equipped for the task of taking a large city.
“We went without helicopters, just in a column, as if we were going to a parade.”
Sergey believes that his commanders expected to capture key cities very quickly, and had calculated that the Ukrainians would simply surrender.
“We advanced continuously, with very short stops at night, without trenches, without reconnaissance. We had no one in the rear, so if someone decided to attack us from behind, we had no protection.”
“I think (many of) our soldiers died largely because of this. If we had moved gradually, if we had checked the roads for mines, a lot of loss could have been avoided.”
Sergey’s complaints about the lack of equipment also surfaced in telephone conversations purportedly between Russian soldiers and their families, intercepted and posted online by the Ukrainian security services.
In early April, Sergey was sent across the border to a camp on the Russian side. Troops had withdrawn from northern Ukraine and appeared to be regrouping for an eastern assault.
Later that month Sergey was ordered to return to Ukraine, but told his commander that he was unwilling to go.
“He told me it was my choice. He didn’t even (try) to dissuade us, because we weren’t the first,” the young man told the BBC.
But Sergey was worried about his unit’s reaction to his refusal to fight and decided to seek legal advice.
A lawyer told Sergey and two other soldiers in the same situation to return their weapons and return to their unit headquarters, where they should submit a letter explaining that they were “morally and psychologically exhausted” and could no longer fight in Ukraine.
The attorney said returning to the unit was important because simply leaving could be construed as desertion, which can result in a two-year sentence in a disciplinary military trial.
Russian human rights lawyer Alexei Tabalov points out that commanders try to intimidate contract soldiers into staying with their units.
But Tabalov stresses that Russian military law includes clauses allowing soldiers to refuse to fight if they don’t want to.
Human rights activist Sergei Krivenko says he is not aware of any trials for those who refuse to return to the front lines.
But this does not mean that these processes are not attempted.
A commander in northern Russia requested that a criminal case be brought against his subordinate who refused to return to Ukraine, but a military prosecutor refused to proceed, according to documents seen by the BBC. Such an action would be “premature” without having assessed the damage to the unit the subordinate was part of, the prosecutor said.
And there is no guarantee that there will be no further prosecutions in the future.
Soldiers like Sergey reluctant to return to the front lines are not unusual, according to Ruslan Leviev, editor of the Conflict Intelligence Team, a media initiative that investigates the Russian military’s experiences in Ukraine through confidential interviews.
Leviev says his team estimates that a sizeable minority of contract soldiers sent to Ukraine at the start of the invasion refused to return.
Independent Russian media also reported hundreds of cases of soldiers who have refused to return to Ukraine since early April.
Lawyers and human rights activists consulted by the BBC said they have regularly offered advice to soldiers seeking to avoid returning to the front lines in Ukraine.
Each of our interviewees said they have dealt with dozens of cases and believe that these soldiers have also shared the advice with colleagues.
Although Sergey does not want to return to the front lines, he does want to complete his military service in Russia to avoid future consequences. But this means that while his letter of refusal to fight was accepted, there is no guarantee that he will not be sent back to Ukraine during his tour of duty.
“I can see that the war is going on, it’s not going to go away,” Sergey told the BBC. “In these months (of compulsory military service) that I have left, anything, even the worst, could happen.”
* Sergey’s name has been changed.
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-61673922, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-06-06 05:20:07
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