Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ Organised crime is now thriving in the Russian army as a result of its recruitment of tens of thousands of convicts. Former inmates extort, rob and torture soldiers with impunity to extract millions of rubles in pay and bonuses from them, as two recent accounts highlight. ⬇️

2/ Aleksandr Vladimirovich Efreemov of the 9th Separate Motorised Rifle Brigade (military unit 71443) told his wife that "If you don't find the money soon, they'll kill me". After arriving at a location in Ukraine, he was thrown into an open-air pit along with many other men.

3/ His wife says: “He spent all this time in a pit, and there were boys sitting there with him. They were beaten every day with clubs and rebar, and money was beaten out of them.”

4/ They had to write a report that they were volunteering the money to pay for the unit's needs. “They force you to write these reports, that supposedly it’s not under pressure.”

5/ Alexander was ransomed by another man who had also been beaten, who paid the money for both Alexander and himself. The soldiers tried to file a collective complaint about the criminality of their commanders but it only resulted in their humiliation and more beatings.

6/ According to his wife, an unknown officer came to them and singled out the complainants: “They put a skirt on a boy who wanted to write a complaint, put a bulletproof vest on him, and wrote obscene words on his vest."

7/ "And they beat him publicly, demonstratively, right on the parade ground.”

Alexander was thrown back into the pit when he tried to pass on a complaint to the military prosecutor's office, and was told that he would have to pay another million to get out again.

8/ Evgeny Anatolyevich Rudnev, a 'Storm V' fighter with the 33rd Motorised Rifle Regiment (military unit 82717), says that he had to desert temporarily to get medical treatment for a serious leg wound. He was tracked down and forcibly returned, unhealed, to Donetsk.

9/ He says he was locked in a room for a week with other wounded soldiers before being pushed into a car. They "took me to this barn, the so-called VPD, where they keep our sick people.”

10/ Conditions in the VPD turned out to be terrible. The facility was crowded with wounded soldiers who were being denied treatment. According to Rudnev, despite the appalling conditions, most of the wounded tried to stay there in order avoid getting sent on combat missions.

11/ “The ceiling is supported by logs so that it doesn’t fall. They don’t treat you there either, it’s impossible to get treatment there, but people need operations. They just sit there. When the salary comes, [the officers] collect extortions from them by any means.

12/ "They offer [you] to stay, so that you don’t go. Basically, everyone tries to pay, so that they can just lie in the medical battalion and not go to the assault."

13/ Rudnev says that the medical battalion was controlled by former convicts who took bribes to allow soldiers to have various privileges denied to others, such as using their mobile phones in the facility. They spent the money on cars, alcohol, and drugs.

14/ "And I hear a conversation that 'Lezgin' and 'Patron' stole 7 million on their card. Where they stole it from, I don't know. None of them go to depots or anywhere. They just sit on this shed, ride around there, walk, go on vacation as they please, drink something."

16/ “They lined us up at midnight on this shed ... There were about 30 of us lined up, something like 40. They took everyone’s phones. They very persistently demanded the passcodes for the phones.

17/ "At the end, when they took all the phones, they put me in [the middle of] a circle and started explaining that it was because of me. That is, they are creating a conflict situation. They are setting the department against me with all this."

18/ After this, other soldiers began threatening Rudyev with violence and he continued to experience pressure from the commanders. He decided to desert again, as by now he feared for his life. /end

Sources:
🔹 t.me/ne_zhdi_novost…
🔹 t.me/ne_zhdi_novost…