One combatant was shot twice, rapidly dispatched from hospital back to the battleground, where he clung to life on melted snow. Ordered to launch attacks on Ukrainian positions again and again, he persevered until a grenade took his sight. Rescued from the hellish trenches by a doctor, he was reassigned as a hospital orderly.
Another was incarcerated at the age of 20 for minor drug offenses, and thrusted into the front lines at 23. With virtually no training, he tragically lost his life just three weeks later. His demise was amongst a probable 60 Russians killed on a day marked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s celebration of the Nazi defeat in Red Square.
These two narratives, one of remarkable survival and the other of untimely death, epitomize the grueling and lamentable loss of life in Russia’s trenches. Yet, there is one chilling distinction: the fallen are convicts, lured by the prospect of respite from their imprisonment if they enlist in the so-called Storm-Z battalions overseen by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Life expectancy in these units is alarmingly short, the living conditions perilous, and the convicts depict themselves as sacrificial lambs. Tens of thousands of convicts have been coerced to serve on the front lines, initially through the mercenary group Wagner, and subsequently by the defense ministry.
CNN corresponded with the mother of one such convict, Andrei, who was sentenced at 20 for drug offenses and dispatched to the front line under the Russian military’s recruitment initiative. The grieving mother furnished substantial video footage, documentation, and chat messages to corroborate her son’s story, and his premature demise, a mere three weeks after deployment.
CNN also interviewed Sergei, a rare survivor of the notorious Storm-Z units, who recounted the brutal and progressively worsening conditions in the Russian trenches. He was initially interviewed over the phone from a military hospital and revisited his experiences months later.
While the dreadful fighting conditions are widely recognized, much of the Russian testimony is sourced from prisoners of war, facilitated by Ukrainians. These two narratives provide rare, first-hand accounts directly from Russians. CNN has anonymized the identities and redacted crucial details from these two accounts to ensure the safety of the interviewees.
Sergei currently toils at two jobs to sustain his family, still anticipating military compensation for his multiple injuries. He experiences persistent tinnitus from shell shock, disrupting his sleep in the tranquility of his home.
He shared that he suffered nine concussions from nearby artillery shell landings while on the front line, over an eight-month span. Last winter he was shot in the leg, only to be returned to the front after a meager 10 days’ treatment. He was shot again, this time in the shoulder, and properly hospitalized. A mere two months later, due to a manpower shortage, he was redeployed to the front lines, where he noted that convict amputees were assigned radio duties, and troops were discarding their bulletproof vests due to their minimal protective value.
Daily Atrocities
The casualties are staggeringly high. Sergei revealed that of the 600 prisoners enlisted in his unit in October, only 170 were alive, and all bar two of them were wounded. “Every individual was injured, two, three, some even four times,” he stated. He remembered witnessing comrades torn apart by close shell landings and his astonishment at surviving. One attack was particularly lucid.
“I recollect most distinctly the last of the nine concussions I sustained,” he remarked. “We advanced. RPGs and drones were aimed at us. Our commander commanded over the radio, ‘Proceed regardless! Do not retreat until you seize this position!’ Two of us located a small foxhole and sought refuge there.”
However, their ordeal was far from over. “A (Ukrainian) drone launched a grenade at us, and it nestled in the 30-centimeter gap between us. My comrade was impaled with shrapnel everywhere. Miraculously, I remained untouched. But I was blinded for five hours – just a stark white veil before my eyes. I was physically carried out.”
Ultimately, he encountered doctors who showed compassion, assigning him the role of a hospital orderly – tasked with moving cadavers, checking bodies for identification papers, cleaning – until the final month of his contract was served.
Sergei recounts the daily horrors of the Russian trenches. Rations primarily comprised of canned meat supplemented with instant noodles, but water was the most scarce. “One had to trek three to four kilometers to fetch it. There were times we went without food or drink for several days,” he expressed. In the winter, they survived by consuming melted snow. “It was far from palatable, but it was a necessity.”
Discipline was upheld through executions, he added. “Sometimes, the commander ‘reset’ people. He erased them, murdered them. I witnessed it once – a dispute with a man who stole from and killed his comrades in the trenches. I did not see which of the four people surrounding him fired the fatal shot. But when he attempted to flee, a bullet struck him in the back of his head. I saw the head wound. They carried him away.”
The Freedom Mirage
For Andrei, the horrors at the frontline were short-lived. His mother, Yulia, described how he was “barely a man” when he was dispatched to the frontline at age 23. His jesting voice messages – about mundane things like weather – and youthful appearance in uniform, betray an innocent soul trapped in a malevolent world.
Yulia commented: “He could not recall the sum of money offered to him, he hadn’t bothered to check. So, I perceived no financial motive for him. It was solely about freedom. He had a long sentence, nine-and-a-half years, and he had served three.”
Yulia presented a video of Andrei on a training ground in occupied Ukraine, briefly learning assault tactics. His slightly shaven face was captured in still images, sunburned, beneath a large camouflage helmet, in the rear of an army truck. The images were sparse, as his tenure on the front was brief.
It was on May 8 that Andrei messaged his mother to inform her that his unit was being deployed to the front, one of the most hotly contested sections of the eastern battlefield.
The onslaught was scheduled to commence at dawn, on May 9 – a significant day in modern Russian history when the Kremlin commemorates the Soviet victory over the Nazis with ostentatious military parades across Red Square. Putin presided over a pared-down version of the ceremony this year, which analysts attribute to a significant portion of Moscow’s arsenal being damaged or redirected to the Ukrainian front.
Yulia tearfully recollected that last interaction. “We were arguing. It is devastating to admit, but I already resigned to his death. He left (Russia) fully aware of the implications. Every day I pleaded with him ‘no, no, no.’ And he didn’t heed me. When he said, ‘we’re going to storm,’ I wrote him ‘Run, Forrest, Run.'”
Like many convicts with restricted mobile access on the front lines, he disappeared entirely. In the weeks that followed, Yulia learned from relatives of other prisoners recruited from his penal colony that up to 60 had perished in that one assault – a figure difficult to verify, but in line with the astronomical casualties reported by observers from these convict-staffed units.
Yulia received no body, or personal effects, only a letter from the Ministry of Defense which postdated Andrei’s death as the day he departed prison for the front lines.
“The most painful part was my fear that he would become a killer,” Yulia wept. “As ludicrous as it may sound, I was terrified he would endure all this and return as a murderer. I can reconcile with my son as a drug addict, but with my son as a killer – it was an arduous reality for me to accept.”
At times, the horrors inflicted by Russia’s invasion on Ukraine are rivaled by the self-inflicted wounds it deals to its own populace.