President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has built a war machine in Ukraine with an insatiable demand for men.
Underpinning that machine is a pattern of brutality and coercion in which commanders dole out abuse as punishment while exploiting soldiers — even the gravely ill or injured — to keep them on the battlefield, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
Mr. Putin has hailed the troops fighting his war of attrition as sacred heroes, and Russian society as the most important weapon in his forces’ advance on the battlefield. But more than 6,000 confidential complaints about the war reviewed by The Times show that anger and discontent simmer beneath the surface as the Russian leader’s methods for sustaining the war destroy countless military families.
“We’ve been living in fear for three years, keeping silent about everything,” the wife of a soldier from Saratov, a city in southwestern Russia, wrote in one complaint. “I’m being torn apart on the inside from the injustice!”
Thousands of those petitioning the Russian government struggle to get answers about their missing or imprisoned loved ones. More than 1,500 of them describe wrongdoing in the ranks that is largely hidden from the Russian public because of a ban on criticizing the military and the eradication of independent media.
The complaints of severe abuse appear to be most concentrated in units with troops recruited from prisons and pretrial detention. The Kremlin relies on such soldiers to avoid a broader draft that could generate opposition to the war.
Allegations of a vast array of abuses are laid out in the documents:
- Soldiers are sent to the front despite debilitating medical conditions like broken limbs, Stage 4 cancer, epilepsy, severely damaged vision and hearing, head trauma, schizophrenia and stroke complications.
- Released prisoners of war are deployed directly back to active combat.
- Russian commanders threaten their own soldiers with death so often that the killings have their own name — “zeroing out.”
- Some commanders extort or steal from their soldiers, including by collecting money to exempt troops from deadly missions.
- Soldiers who complain, object to doomed missions or refuse to pay bribes can be beaten, locked in basements, stuffed in pits or tied to trees.
- Recruits brought in through a draft or mandatory military service are pressured to sign extended contracts and threatened with transfers to assault units with high mortality rates if they refuse.
- The confidential complaints were submitted to the Russian human rights ombudsman, Tatyana N. Moskalkova, who reports to Mr. Putin. After a mistake by her office, complaints filed between April and September were made accessible online, according to Maxim Kurnikov, the founder and editor of Echo, an online Russian news outlet in Berlin. He and his team collected the files and provided them to The Times.
Ms. Moskalkova’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Times took extensive steps to confirm the overall authenticity of the documents. First, reporters contacted more than 240 of the complainants. While most did not respond or refused to talk, 75 confirmed that they had filed a petition. Dozens gave additional details. Email addresses, phone numbers and publicly available information were also used to confirm the identity of complainants.
Second, The Times conducted detailed interviews in a number of cases to confirm the veracity of the claims made in the filings. In attachments to filings and in interactions with The Times, the petitioners often provided corroborating materials such as videos, photographs, voice memos and text messages from the front, as well as medical reports, court files and internal military documents. In many cases, The Times was unable to corroborate the claims within filings.
Complainants who spoke to The Times in some instances said that the Russian authorities had opened criminal investigations or responded in some other way. A handful had their cases resolved. But many said they had received no substantive action beyond formulaic letters.
Though a pattern of abuse emerges across hundreds of testimonies, the complainants represent only a sliver of the wider Russian military. It is unclear how widespread the practices are across the force, nor are there signs that the abuses augur a weakening Russian military effort. The complaints regularly describe a fear of retaliation for reporting abuse, meaning other instances of wrongdoing most likely have not been reported to the ombudsman.
The Times is withholding full names and some identifying details of the soldiers and their families to maintain their privacy and protect them from potential official retribution, except in cases when soldiers or their relatives agreed to their use. The petitions contain many accusations that could be illegal to make publicly in Russia.
In an Aug. 27 complaint, a soldier’s mother, Oksana Krasnova, attached a video her son had taken of himself and a comrade handcuffed to a tree for four days without food, water or access to a toilet. She pleaded, “They are not animals!”
She also made the story public on social media, saying her son and his comrade had been punished for refusing to go on a suicide mission that involved taking a photo with a Russian flag on Ukrainian-held territory.
Reached by The Times, the son, Ilya Gorkov, said he had taken the video near Kreminna, Ukraine, after hiding a phone in his sleeve and that he was released thanks only to a relative with connections in the Russian security services. He said he had hired a lawyer and was refusing to return to his unit, because doing so “would be like signing my own death warrant.”
“People in wheelchairs are being sent to the front, without arms or legs,” he said. “I saw it all with my own eyes.”
Coercion to Fight
As the war has dragged on, Moscow has gone to ever greater lengths to keep the front in Ukraine supplied with troops.
Mr. Putin ordered a draft of civilians in the first year of the invasion. His military has also signed up prisoners, debtors and foreign fighters, and has hired private mercenaries. To lure soldiers, it has
offered lavish signing bonuses, injury payouts and other rewards.
The complaints show that coercion remains integral to filling Russia’s ranks. They reveal the pressure that conscripted soldiers are under to sign extended contracts. One soldier described being manipulated into agreeing to such a contract by his base’s psychologist. Another provided materials indicating that drafted soldiers who refused to sign contracts were, as a policy, being transferred to assault companies, the most dangerous units.
Once recruited, the complaints show, soldiers face extraordinary pressure to stay in battle, even if they are unfit for service.
“I know that war is war,” Lyubov, who filed one such complaint about the treatment of her son, said in a phone interview from southern Russia. “But this is a different war.”
Lyubov hails from a military family. Her husband died in Russia’s war against Chechen separatists. But she said she never could have imagined the “lawlessness” in the Russian Army now.
Her son was awaiting treatment for a leg broken on the battlefield when unidentified men grabbed him off the street and, she said, sent him back to the front. It was the third time that he had been forced into battle despite injuries, she said. After a concussion in 2023, her complaint asserted, a battalion commander told her son: “Everyone here has a concussion, and not just one. Who’s going to fight? You’ll get treated at home.”
Multiple filings describe situations in which soldiers who were refused medical treatment left their units to seek civilian care, only to be branded absent without leave. They were then picked up by the military police and sent back to the front, often while still wounded.
In many cases, men who have been ill or injured are deemed ready for frontline fighting after only cursory checks, the filings assert. In the city of Voronezh in southwestern Russia, one soldier’s sister said in a complaint, a medical commission reviewing fitness for service processed 100 men per hour. Other filings say that wounded soldiers are being redeployed before their fitness has even been assessed.
In an interview with The Times, one Russian soldier who filed a complaint described being surprised when he was at a medical facility and met seriously ill soldiers being sent back to battle.
“How can you send back a person with liver cirrhosis who has who knows how long to live, or with cancer?” the soldier asked. “Give him the opportunity to die at home, so to speak. Why is he being sent?”
In one complaint, a woman said her father was deceived into signing a contract and sent to the front, despite suffering from mixed personality disorder, disorientation and depression. She warned that he was prescribed potent antipsychotic drugs and could be a danger to himself and others in a war zone.
Some of the complaints describe injured soldiers’ canes being taken away as they are returned to the force. In others, including one case documented on video, men are reported to be sent into battle while still using crutches and canes.
The Times contacted two people who said they were relatives of two injured soldiers in the video. One relative said it was taken late last year near the village of Mozhnyakivka in the occupied Luhansk region of Ukraine, where the Russian military was sending fighters from penal regiments for rehabilitation.
Both relatives said their loved ones had since disappeared. One of them, Yelena Roslyakova, said that her husband, Andrei Zubaryov, 31, could be seen limping with a cane in the video.
In at least 95 cases reviewed by The Times, prisoners of war released by Ukraine were returned against their will to Russian military service, often to active combat.
Thousands of captive Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been freed in prisoner exchanges over the last four years. The documents show that Russia sometimes sends these troops back to the front line as quickly as a day after their release.
One Russian soldier who said he had been sent back to the front line after seven months in Ukrainian captivity described in a complaint how memories from his time as a P.O.W. were causing him to panic and make poor decisions on the battlefield.
“Given my psychological state, sending a former prisoner of war to an active combat zone is a rash decision,” he said in the complaint. “How can I carry out the orders of the command if this whole situation is affecting me mentally?”
Battlefield Abuse
Many of the complaints, particularly from regiments composed of former prisoners, describe a battlefield dynamic in which soldiers fear beatings or extortion by their own commanders as much as being killed by the enemy.
Doling out gruesome punishments helps some commanders to keep sway over their soldiers, or simply to profit from them. Objecting or leaving a unit often brings new abuse.
Natalya Lukyanchuk, a 74-year-old from the Tula region south of Moscow, submitted multiple complaints describing mistreatment of her grandson. She said in an interview that he had been handcuffed to a radiator and beaten for much of the past month at a base in Kamchatka, in Russia’s Far East.
The grandson, Danil Sushchikh, had about a year remaining in a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence when he signed a one-year military contract to get out, she said. He had been convicted of hitting a person while driving a car.
During combat in Ukraine, he was injured twice, leaving him with shrapnel embedded in his knee, an injured leg and torn ligaments in his right arm, she said. Over the course of his service, she said, he was kicked in his injured leg, beaten in the face, locked in a cold room for 24 hours without clothes and told he would be sent to his death.
“The commanders treat them like animals,” Ms. Lukyanchuk said. “I say to them directly: ‘This isn’t an army. These are werewolves in epaulets.’”
Ms. Lukyanchuk said her grandson’s problems grew even worse after he began insisting that he had fulfilled his yearlong contract and would no longer serve. When he left the unit, she said, he was labeled absent without leave. He was returned by force to the military, she added, leading to a new cycle of abuse, including the beatings in Kamchatka.
The complaints demonstrate a level of lawlessness that Moscow has come to accept on the front.
Multiple submissions include evidence that soldiers were tied to trees as punishment. One mother sent in a video of her son receiving such treatment, saying he had been singled out because he came from one of Russia’s ethnic minorities.
Mr. Gorkov, the soldier who managed to film himself handcuffed around a tree, said comrades from his unit, No. 12274, sent him photos showing that the practice had continued after he was able to get out.
“There are some bastards among those commanders who tie people to trees, extort money and so on,” he said. “They are confident of their impunity because they don’t go on the assault mission with the guys, knowing that it’s a one-way trip.”
In other complaints, soldiers say they were beaten and forced into pits as a form of punishment.
In one video submitted to the ombudsman, a pair of soldiers have black eyes, a broken nose, knocked-out teeth and lashes across the buttocks — abuse they say they received for criticizing their commanders. They were also stuffed into a hole in the ground, they said.
“They’re treating us like dogs. They held me in a pit for a week and a half,” another soldier wrote in a text message to his mother that was included in a complaint.
Some soldiers report being punished for resisting extortion. Troops in certain units have been asked to pay bribes to go on leave, secure transfers to another regiment or avoid going as “meat” on the next high-mortality assault, according to the complaints.
One soldier named Mikhail told The Times that some commanders collected bribes to exclude soldiers from the most dangerous assaults but would sometimes take the money and send them on the mission anyway.
The flood of government money to compensate soldiers after injuries has opened up new extortion opportunities. Complaints accuse commanders of demanding a cut of payouts that soldiers received for suffering injuries or, in one case, reporting fabricated injuries.
Ms. Lukyanchuk said she had been warned repeatedly by commanders that the complaints she and her daughter had been making would only make things worse for her grandson. But Ms. Lukyanchuk said she believed that “what they’re doing is torture.”
“As a grandmother and a mother, I simply have no other choice but to fight for my grandson using all legal means and to tell everyone about what is being done to him,” she said.
‘Zeroing Out’
The young Russian soldier appeared onscreen in fatigues, speaking quickly in a hushed tone.
The soldier, Said Murtazaliyev, 18, explained that on the orders of his commander, he had collected about $15,000 in bribes from his fellow troops, who were paying to avoid being sent on the next sure-death assault.
Then the commander decided to send Mr. Murtazaliyev on the assault himself, the soldier said in the video.
“So if I don’t get in touch in the next day or two, you can release this video,” Mr. Murtazaliyev said, appearing to hold back tears as the footage cut off. He sent the video to his mother, Leila Nakhshunova.
In a separate text message to Ms. Nakhshunova, he said that he was being deliberately killed to cover up the bribery, she said in an interview.
The practice he was describing has become so common in the Russian military that it has its own name: obnuleniye, or “zeroing out.” It can mean lethal orders designed to get soldiers killed by the enemy. Or it can involve the direct killing of soldiers by their fellow troops on the battlefield.
“Zeroing out” goes beyond sending troops into a mission with a high risk of losses, something troops have contended with throughout history. Russian commanders have been accused of setting out to have certain soldiers killed, often as retribution or punishment, in some cases sending them into battle without weapons or protection.
The word appears in at least 44 complaints reviewed by The Times. More than 100 mention a direct threat by a commander to kill his own soldier, part of a broader pattern of fratricidal violence.
Panicked family members write to warn that they have information suggesting that their husbands, brothers or sons are about to be zeroed out. Others ask for help finding the bodies of their loved ones, saying they have reason to believe they were sent to their deaths deliberately.
One complaint, submitted jointly by 10 female relatives of soldiers, alleged the direct murder of soldiers by their superiors in a military unit, No. 36994, based 230 miles east of Moscow outside the city of Nizhny Novgorod.
The women accused commanders from the base of killing more than 300 of their own soldiers on the battlefield in Ukraine. At times, the women asserted, the commanders took phones from the bodies to withdraw money from the soldiers’ bank accounts.
“To conceal evidence of the murders, the bodies of the executed soldiers were either buried in abandoned places or blown up with antitank mines, leaving virtually nothing behind,” the complaint said. “Only small fragments of bodies were delivered to relatives in sealed zinc coffins, while a majority remained somewhere out there in the fields.”
The women wrote that the military authorities had arrested some people in the unit in 2023 and 2024 to deal with the issue, but that the killings had continued this year nonetheless.
Mr. Murtazaliyev was assigned to that unit. His mother, Ms. Nakhshunova, was one of the women who signed on to the joint complaint.
The ranks of Unit No. 36994 were filled in large part with people who enlisted from pretrial detention or prison.
Another soldier from the same unit as Mr. Murtazaliyev submitted a separate complaint saying that he had fled the ranks after learning he would be zeroed out.
Mr. Murtazaliyev, who was from the southern region of Dagestan, had been visiting a town outside Moscow with a friend when he was arrested and charged with bank card fraud, according to Ms. Nakhshunova.
In pretrial detention, he was given a choice: to be prosecuted with a guaranteed guilty verdict or to sign a contract to go to the front, Ms. Nakhshunova said. He signed the contract, she added, only after having a gas mask placed over his head and his chest compressed to make him faint.
He has not been heard from since March 7, the day he sent the video to Ms. Nakhshunova saying he would be zeroed out. She posted the video online and later sent it to The Times.
He has been listed as missing in action, she said. In his video, Mr. Murtazaliyev named two commanders he said had ordered his death. Ms. Nakhshunova said the authorities had told her that they could not open a criminal case against the commanders on suspicion of murder if her son’s body had not been recovered. She has inquired with the military unit about obtaining it.
“They said it had most likely been blown up and that the pieces that remained had been eaten by wild animals,” Ms. Nakhshunova said. “So I shouldn’t expect to see the body.”
That lack of closure for the parents and spouses of lost Russian soldiers appears across thousands of complaints.
Svetlana Popova, from the Irkutsk region of Siberia, said that she had submitted a complaint but was met with “silence everywhere” as she tried to find out whether her son, Aleksandr Chekulayev, had been murdered in a military coverup.
A hospital outside the occupied city of Donetsk in Ukraine first said he had died of heart failure and later claimed he had died in his sleep from a blood clot. When she saw his body, Ms. Popova said, she found him brutally disfigured, with a fractured skull, a broken nose and a slit throat.
The chief doctor at the hospital, reached by The Times, rejected any suggestion of foul play, saying the damage on the body had originated from an autopsy. She told The Times that the hospital was cooperating with an investigation.
Ms. Popova is unconvinced, in part because the military returned her son’s phone wiped clean of its data.
“Today they are going to kill me,” she said her son had told her in June from the hospital, where he was being treated for a battlefield injury.
It was the last she heard from him.
