Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ Relatives of convicts serving with a Storm Z penal company of convicts say that their men become 'ghosts' on being recruited and aren't being paid. They don't have proper fire support, uniforms or equipment, don't have medicines and aren't being evacuated when wounded. ⬇️

2/ A group of relatives of men serving with the 488th Motorised Rifle Regiment, 144th Motorised Rifle Division, 20th District Guards Army in Ukraine have recorded an 'appeal to the Tsar' asking for Putin's help with their men's desperate situation.

3/ The 488th has been fighting in eastern Ukraine since last year and has endured heavy losses in that time, notably in futile battles around the village of Dovhen'ke. Since then they appear to have been operating in the Kreminna–Svatove area, where there has been much fighting.

4/ Storm Z units are created mostly from convicts recruited by the Russian Ministry of Defence from penal colonies around Russia. In January 2023, the MOD banned the Wagner Group from recruiting in prisons and began its own prison recruitment programme.

5/ The Russian military appears to be treating its convict soldiers as brutally as Wagner did, as complaint videos such as the one below indicate. They say their commanders set them impossible tasks, lead them into slaughter and shoot at their feet.

https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1678367921989353472

6/ The men in that video are reported to have been removed from a hospital and sent back to the war zone shortly after the video was posted. Their commanders threatened to punish them as '500s' (refuseniks). According to one of the men:

7/ "The whole group of us who were in the video were loaded [into trucks] and are now being taken somewhere. They may declare us 500, like we are refuseniks. But no one refused to fight, we are being treated [wrongly]!"

8/ "We'll be interrogated. We'll tell it like it is. Why? Do they think they'll scare us?"

After sending that message, relatives lost contact with the men. Their present whereabouts are unknown.

9/ Another group of relatives in the video at the top of this thread tell a similar story of mistreatment of their men, convicts from the IK-3 colony in Yelets. They say that their men "officially don't exist anywhere" and have been given empty payroll cards. Many have died.

10/ "At the moment our surviving soldiers have no clear [chain of] command, but there are ruthless commanders who give orders to go forward to the artillery with shovels and automatic rifles, across a whole field of rotting corpses. The bodies are not given to relatives."

11/ There are lots of missing, and the wounded are abandoned on the battlefield, and not evacuated."

The relatives appeal to Putin to provide "fire support, uniformed vehicles, which [the unit] badly needs in order to transport the wounded, as well as medical supplies."

12/ Previous appeals to the military have been fruitless, resulting only in "only empty replies that refer to each other".

The relatives want "official confirmation on all papers that [the men] are people there and not meat, which is thrown there as bait for the enemy".

13/ "Our soldiers do not refuse to serve. They love their country and are ready to fight. They only ask for one thing, that there be clarity ... We hope for your humanity that we will be heard."

Sources:
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