Ukrainian soldiers fire anti-tank missile system of the 35th Separate Marine Brigade of the Ukrainian Army on the frontline, in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine on February 10, 2023.
Mustafa Ciftci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
A Russian soldier told the New York Times he was forced to charge enemy lines without training.
The soldier is one of many former convicts who say they’re used as part of sacrificial assaults.
The assaults are carried out by the Wagner Group, the New York Times reported.
A Russian prisoner-turned-soldier told the New York Times that he and other convicts were thrown onto the front line of Russia’s war against Ukraine with no training and told to charge “as far as we could go” into Ukrainian gunfire.
The 44-year-old soldier, identified only as Aleksandr, told the Times that he joined the Wagner Group, a Russian private military contractor with close ties to the Kremlin, to reduce his prison sentence by three years. He had been convicted for illegal logging, according to the Times.
The Times reported that Aleksandr — and other prisoners like him who joined the Wagner Group in exchange for pardons — told The Times that they were essentially used as human sacrifices to advance the Russian position into Ukrainian-controlled areas.
Without training and with minimal weaponry, these groups of soldiers are forced to run into Ukrainian gunfire to help Russian forces determine where the opposition is located, according to the Times.
Aleksandr told the Times that his commanders “brought us to a basement, divided us into five-person groups and, though we hadn’t been trained, told us to run ahead, as far as we could go.”
The soldiers were also told that if they refused orders to advance, they’d be shot, the Times reported.
When it was his time to rush toward enemy lines, Aleksandr was captured along with one other soldier. The other three in his group were killed in the gunfire, according to the Times.
Aleksandr is now in a Ukrainian prisoner-of-war camp, the Times reported.
Half the soldiers in these assaults are wounded or killed, one soldier told the Times. By other estimates, about 70% of soldiers are wounded or killed in battalions with former convicts, military analysts told the Times.
The White House said last month that the Wagner Group had about 40,000 convicts deployed to Ukraine as part of Russia’s war against the Eastern European country.