1/ The Russian news outlet Verstka reported yesterday that hundreds of mobilised Russian soldiers have died on the front line. TV Rain has independently corroborated it, reporting that officers told the men "You are meat, that's why you were brought here." Translation follows. ⬇️
2/ TV Rain spoke to the relatives of two other fighters who survived and tried to reconstruct a picture of the fighting.
3/ Aleksandr, from the Voronezh region, was mobilised on 16 October. Two weeks later, on 31 October, he was taken to a unit in the town of Valuyki in the Belgorod region, says his sister Yulia, who asked not to give her last name.
4/ Soon her brother called her to say that they were being taken to the Luhansk region, after which contact with him was lost.
5/ The next time Aleksandr was able to call was on 5 November. He said that on 1 November they were brought to Luhansk oblast and immediately sent to the front line. "The commanders said that you are meat, that's why you were brought here, you will all be killed anyway."
6/ "They gave them one sapper shovel for 30 men and told them to dig their own trenches," says Yulia, her brother. After that, the commanders told the men that they were going to fetch food for them, and left. Forty minutes later, the mobilised men began to be bombed.
7/ The shelling continued for three days. "They had no weapons, nothing. They were given four grenades, they were digging the ground with their hands," says Ekaterina Brazhnikova, the sister of another mobilised man.
8/ Her brother Viktor Stegantsev was also drafted in the Voronezh region, and later ended up in the same battalion in Valuyki as Aleksandr.
According to Ekaterina, there were more than 500 people in the battalion that was deployed from Valuyki to the Luhansk region.
According to Ekaterina, there were more than 500 people in the battalion that was deployed from Valuyki to the Luhansk region.
10/ The survivors reached Svatove, from where they called their relatives. There, they are housed in groups in abandoned houses, according to Yulia. As soon as they try to go out, they start getting shot at.
11/ "They are sitting in a house of some kind, the commander came back to them and said: "You will come back from here as mincemeat"," says Katerina, quoting her brother's words.
12/ The fighters whose relatives were interviewed by TV Rain find it difficult to name the exact place where they came under fire.
13/ Survivors' accounts, collected by Verstka, refer to Makiivka, a settlement located about 30 km southwest of Svatove, in the direction from the border of the Belgorod region, where the battalion came from, to the border of the Kharkiv region. 
14/ The Russian Defence Ministry's official briefs for 30 and 31 October provide almost identical text stating that "the enemy attempted to conduct offensives" in the direction of Makiivka, but "all attacks were repelled".
15/ From 1 to 3 November, the Ministry of Defence reports that attempts by the Ukrainian armed forces to attack near Makiivka were foiled and the enemy "as a result of active action by Russian troops and artillery" were pushed back "to their initial positions".
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