1/ Over a thousand Russian soldiers who are sick, injured, or refusing to fight are being held prisoner in a concentration camp. They are chained to their bunks and denied medical treatment or hearings before they are sent to Ukraine to die en masse in 'meat wave' assaults. ⬇️
2/ The 'Novokuznetsk capital' Telegram channel has posted a video reportedly of men from the 74th Kuzbass Motorised Rifle Brigade, showing multiple men lying in bunks inside a tented structure. They are clearly chained to the bunks with wrist manacles.
3/ Relatives of the men have released the video and say that, according to the men, a 'penal regiment' – similar to the Stalin-era shtrafbats – has been created in a camp in Yurga, in Russia's Kemerovo region in Siberia. 
4/ The men are a mixture of the wounded and sick, those who went AWOL, and some who came into conflict with their previous commanders and were transferred to the penal regiment as a punishment.
5/ One soldier says, “There are people without fingers, there are old men who don’t understand where they are, there are people on crutches”.
6/ The prisoners say they are are confined to the camp and banned from using phones. Harsh punishments are inflicted for any offence, including being beaten and denied food, water, or access to a toilet.
7/ "Last week, five [military policemen] beat up a boy, they think they are tough and right," says one relative. "They turned in a comrade from the company. The military police took him, poured pepper spray on his face and beat him," another source says.
8/ A relative comments on how the imprisoned soldiers are treated: "If in the camp they feed you once a day, then in the penal camp they sometimes “forget” to feed you at all, they don’t always take you to the toilet either, they wet themselves. What kind of treatment is this?"
9/ "They sit in handcuffs and pray that they won’t be killed. We just don’t know what can be done – it turns out they will be killed [at the front] anyway, and they won’t be able to live [in the refusenik camp] anyway."
10/ The camp is said to include a prison within a prison – a holding area where offenders are kept on a concrete floor without food or water.
11/ "They put people in 30 by 10 square meters and let them go to the toilet once a day. Or they might forget - people go into bottles, and sometimes under themselves," one soldier says.
12/ "If you start to assert your rights, literally – if you ask a doctor for a wounded man who has started to fester, you are sent to [the internal] prison."
13/ In what appears to be a fairly common scam in the Russian army, the guards force the prisoners to transfer money to them electronically.
"They take away their phones, then secretly bring them for money, call from other people's numbers, well, it's purely a prison."
"They take away their phones, then secretly bring them for money, call from other people's numbers, well, it's purely a prison."
14/ The camp is said to be just one of many similar concentration camps across Russia for soldiers who are sick, wounded, or refusing to fight. The relative of one soldier imprisoned at Yurga says that he was transferred from a similar camp in Berdsk near Novosibirsk.
15/ "All the sick and wounded from Berdsk were thrown into one regiment, with category "D" [unfit for military service], on crutches, bandaged. In November, they promised this regiment of invalids a military-medical commission, but in the end they were simply thrown into Yurga.
16/ "Now they are not promised any medical commission [to determine their fitness], no examination – they will be taken straight to the front. There are about 700 people left there [in Berdsk], as I was told."
17/ According to the men at Yurga, they are all going to be sent to the front in the next few days, where they will be expended in 'meat assaults':
"They will transport us under escort, like cattle. We will seal the carriages at [the prisoners'] expense, they said."
"They will transport us under escort, like cattle. We will seal the carriages at [the prisoners'] expense, they said."
18/ "Just like they transported prisoners in 1945 - just like that. No exits, no entrances. Some had already left in November. There was the first dispatch to Kursk, some had already been killed."
19/ The treatment of these soldiers highlights two important points. First, it's consistent with an ongoing pattern of sick and badly wounded men being sent back to fight (and usually to die), even going into assaults on crutches.
https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1808098253008744539
20/ Second, it's a sign that the legal framework which is supposed to protect Russian soldiers' rights has broken down on a large scale in Russia as well as in occupied areas of Ukraine.
21/ Since at least 2022, 'refuseniks' have been taken to a network of basement-prisons, most notoriously at Zaitseve in the north of the occupied Luhansk region of Ukraine, where they have been tortured and starved to force them back to the front.
https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1671253659668344832
22/ Now it seems that a similar and perhaps even larger system of what are effectively concentration camps has been established deep within Russia itself, illustratinhg how the worst brutalities of the Russian army have spread back into Russia. /end
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