Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Russian soldiers have been executed by their own side during the war in Ukraine – a practice called "zeroing out" or "resetting to zero". It's not just a disciplinary measure but a reflection of rampant corruption and criminality in the army. ⬇️

2/ The Russian army has always practiced execution of its own men on a far greater scale than any Western military, including that of Nazi Germany. A comparison of military executions in the two World Wars illustrates this point.

3/ World War I:
🔺 United States – 11 men
🔺 Germany - 48
🔺 British Empire – 307
🔺 France – 650
🔺 Austria-Hungary - 1,148
🔺 Russian Empire – 10,000-20,000

4/ World War II:
🔺 British Empire – 40
🔺 France – 100
🔺 United States – 102
🔺 Japan – several thousand
🔺 Nazi Germany – 15,000-20,000
🔺 Soviet Union – at least 157,593

Up to 2,000 soldiers were also reportedly executed in the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War.

5/ Executions were also commonly used by the Russian Army in the Crimean War in the 1850s, where the majority of the soldiers were conscripted serfs and harsh discipline was the norm. Commanders sometimes ordered attacks on their own units as a form of punishment.

6/ During the first two years of the war in Ukraine, the Wagner Group became notorious for its extreme brutality towards its own members. It already had a reputation for performative executions in Syria, as the thread below documents.

https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1617515048955437057

7/ Wagner used sledgehammers for public executions, most notoriously in the case of a deserter named Yevgeny Nuzhin, whose skull was crushed on camera in November 2022. Commemorative sledgehammers were later gifted to Wagner members and Russian politicians.

8/ Wagner members were forced to join the regular Russian army following their failed June 2023 uprising. Whether coincidentally or not, reports of executions and murders have increased steadily since then, to the point that they are now published virtually daily.

9/ 'Zeroing out' may mean being executed directly, or indirectly by being sent into an unsurvivable assault. At least one field execution has been captured on a drone video, showing one Russian soldier shooting another several times at point-blank range.

https://x.com/GloOouD/status/1847954368277917806

10/ Others, such as the man shown at the top of this thread who was hanged for desertion, have been publicly executed as a warning to others. This was a common Wagner practice, which also involved showing videos of executions to new recruits as a warning against disobedience.

11/ A big difference between the Soviet era and now is that extrajudicial executions are almost entirely confined to common soldiers. In only the first year of the Soviet-German war, 107 senior officers were arrested for various political and military offences.

12/ They included a marshal, 72 generals, six admirals and commanders of divisions and head of political staffs. 45 were sentenced to be shot, including 34 generals. Ten more died while under arrest. 12% of all senior Soviet officers killed in the war were executed.

13/ They were shot for suspected disloyalty, failure to achieve objectives, theft, drunkenness, and very rarely punishment for crimes against their own men, such as shooting them randomly while drunk. Nowadays, officers appear to have virtual impunity to commit such offences.

14/ While extrajudicial execution is formally prohibited in the modern Russian army, as one soldier says, "the closer to the front line, the fewer rules and the more permissiveness. For any major mistake they could reset your score – there are no laws there."

15/ The threat of 'zeroing' is closely linked to officer criminality in the army. In this video, two soldiers say that they face being executed by their commander if they do not pay him a million rubles ($12,800) from their injury compensation payments.

https://x.com/PStyle0ne1/status/1741838161259446590

16/ Another soldier has described how he had to pay a $38,000 bribe to be evacuated from the battlefield after being wounded, with the prospect of being 'zeroed out' if he didn't pay up.

https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1932503511813795954

17/ Lethal extortion of this kind appears to be commonplace. Chat messages between husbands and wives say that 'zeroing is everywhere'. Natalia says that her husband was "zeroed out" for refusing to pay a bribe to avoid being sent to assault a town from which few returned alive.

18/ Another widow says that "For refusing to collect money to buy drones, they threw him in the very ass. It turns out that they zeroed out the inconvenient one."

19/ Nadezhda's husband refused to give his injury compensation money to his commander. As a result, he was sent to his death in Bakhmut. His last message to his wife was: "Zaya, I won't be back. They're taking us away now to zero out."

20/ As in the Crimean War, there have been reports of commanders deliberately attacking their own units to enforce their orders. In October 2024, soldiers spoke of having defending themselves from attacks by both the Ukrainians and their own commander.

21/ "Our battalion commander ... began to wipe out our fighters a few days ago. Literally committing lynching, killing our people ... he kills the boys because they refuse to move forward, because they lose 90% of their personnel every time they go."

https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1848277447533289760

22/ 'Zeroing' is often used to retaliate against men who complain against their officers. In one instance, all but one of a group of men who recorded an appeal saying their commanders planned to murder them were reportedly subsequently murdered by their commanders.

23/ Other soldiers have been executed for using drugs or alcohol, stealing from others, or even mobilised soldiers refusing to sign a contract to join the army permanently. The killers are not just commanders, but sometimes their own comrades enforcing a harsh discipline.

24/ Reportedly, the format of such killings is often that soldiers are taken by aides of the commander to front-line positions where they are shot or grenaded, ensuring that they become just another anonymous corpse on the line of contact.

25/ Aleksandr Semenov of the 'I Want To Find' project says, "When there are signs of torture or other violence on the body, burial in unmarked graves, burning or blowing up the remains is practiced. This allows the command to reliably hide the traces of the crimes committed."

26/ 'I Want To Find' has reported the existence of so-called "funeral squads" in some units. The 15th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade reportedly created one such squad to secretly remove the bodies of those executed or who died under torture and bury them in unmarked graves.

27/ Many soldiers have reported that the wounded are frequently shot, sometimes as mercy killings but more often to ensure that casualties do not impede assaults or distract men into trying to evacuate them.

https://x.com/VetsForRL/status/1804898184881156180

28/ A Russian soldier describes one such instance in the August 2024 capture of Novohrodivka: "When we were running along the forest plantation, there were two people with us. One of them was a drug addict, the other was just out of the hospital, his lung was punctured."

29/ "They were barely running at the very end and slowed down the entire column. The escort stopped and ran last. As soon as we entered the city, I heard two shots from behind."

30/ "Then the escort caught up with us and said that those two had got lost somewhere. I never saw them again."

31/ 'Zeroing' does not always mean direct murder. More often, it involves sending men into unsurvivable situations, such as assaulting Ukrainian positions without support or occasionally without body armour or even weapons. This is reported frequently.

32/ The practice has become known as 'Puzikism' after the 2024 case of two drone operators with the callsigns 'Goodwin' and 'Ernest', who accused their commander Igor 'Evil' Puzik of drug trafficking. He sent them to their deaths a few days later in an infantry assault.

33/ This form of 'zeroing' has become effectively the standard punishment for desertion. Russian warbloggers say that commanders routinely keep men in line by threatening to send them to assault groups, where their chance of death is almost certain.

https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1943208168210702821

34/ Those who refuse to attack are routinely thrown into open-air pits or tied to trees with no protection from the elements, tortured, or simply shot on the spot, as this Russian POW describes.

https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1824170335631217098

35/ Retreating is also treated as an executable offence. 'Barrier units', often manned by Chechens, shoot soldiers who try to retreat from assaults, as seen in this 2023 drone video.

https://x.com/WotowiecMarek/status/1668232997672288257

36/ Commanders also benefit financially from executing their men or sending them to their deaths. Soldiers in several regiments have reported officers systemically robbing men before sending them to die, in what one calls a 'conveyor belt' system.

https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1943405571857645596

37/ As a final posthumous punishment, men who have been executed or murdered are often declared to be deserters. This deprives their families of any compensation for their deaths and relieves their commanders of any obligations to return their bodies. /end

Sources:
🔹 vot-tak.tv/87689816/za-ch…
🔹 euromaidanpress.com/2019/05/11/sov…
🔹 journals.openedition.org/monderusse/131…
🔹 zona.media/article/2024/1…