Russians ‘don’t want them to come out alive’, refractory soldier’s father recounts the hell of Russian prisons

He threw in the towel and refused to fight any longer. At 26, Yuri is a soldier in a unit based in Sakhalin, in the Russian Far East. His battalion is engaged in Ukraine and took part in the battle of Izioum, from March 7 to April 1. Two months later, in June, the Russian soldier protests and no longer wants to fight. He was then immediately arrested, along with other equally refractory soldiers, and imprisoned in a prison in the Luhansk region.

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One day, he manages to reach his father by telephone. “My son told me about torture, he said they were tortured. I had already understood this when talking to the parents of other soldiers”says Maxime, 50, to franceinfo.

According to what Youri reported, the resisters are regularly beaten, tied up on the ground. There were even mock executions. They would eventually be transferred, one by one. “They are exfiltrated to unknown destinations, says the soldier’s father. Why ? So that they can’t tell anything about what happened in the prisons.”

“They are not sent back to the units where they served before but to special units, to areas of the front where the army suffers the most losses. I believe they do not want them to come out alive.”

Maxime, father of a refractory soldier

at franceinfo

The advances of the Russian army in the Donbass are slow and costly. The units are struggling to recruit fighters, especially since desertions and refusal to fight seem to be increasing in the ranks. For his father, Yuri was taken to Perevalsk prison, near Luhansk. “Then the men of the Wagner group said they needed himreports Maxime. He couldn’t refuse, so he left.”

Yuri’s father traveled to Ukraine to try to find his son. Without much hope. “I found the contact of one of the military commanders. I will go see him tomorrow to talk to him, but I imagine what he will answer me because I am not the first person to meet him”breathes Maxime.

How many are these resisters of the Russian army? Several hundred, maybe several thousand. In June and July, two units present in Ukraine’s Donbass, the 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade and the 11th Airborne Assault Brigade, reported more than 378 refractory soldiers, refusing to continue fighting in Ukraine.