Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ A Russian soldier has spoken of his experience of mutinying with his comrades against his commander and subsequently deserting. "Don't go to fight, no matter what they promise you," he says. "There's only one thing there—death." ⬇️

2/ The man was one of the original batch of men mobilised in October 2022, which he says took place when he was given a draft order at his workplace. He was susequently sent to Ukraine to join an assault unit of the Russian Airborne Forces.

3/ The unidentified man says that his unit mutinied in 2024 after 75% of them were killed in an operation. "We didn't exactly have a storm, probably even worse than that. This is an airborne assault brigade. So, they sent us, the airborne, to be butchered."

4/ Having started with 496 men, the battalion was down to 120-130 men by the time the survivors mutinied. The man says that they were sent to defend a location where "there were no trenches, nothing. Literally an hour passed, they gathered the groups, and the guys left."

5/ "At that point, we had already agreed that we would not go to our positions because we could hear shooting, we could already hear shelling. I said that I wasn't going anywhere, and that was that. Thirty people agreed with me. They all refused to go. Literally.

6/ "It was around one o'clock in the morning. "The commander came and said, 'I'll shoot you, you're 500s [deserters], and so on.' So we sent him in the right direction, pointed the guns in the right direction, and he left."

7/ The mutineers were treated harshly for their actions, with men beaten and tortured, including the man in the video. Some of the soldiers who refused orders were indeed shot.

"There were seven or eight of them, but they were reset there. How do you figure it out?"

8/ "It's not difficult, because, firstly, the men were lying in such a hard-to-reach place, but in the lowland, and the bullet holes there are clearly not shrapnel, not pellets, not [caused by drones], that is. They simply reset the numbers of the guys who refused."

9/ The man decided to fake a psychiatric breakdown to desert, and simulated cutting his wrists. "Of course, I was faking it. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid, right? Of course, I thought it all through... I took every opportunity, hid my veins."

10/ "All that was required of me—I did everything I could to get out of there."

The brigade's chief of staff ordered him to be locked up with nothing to eat and drink, handcuffed to bars (probably stairway railings, as seen in the video below).

https://x.com/yasminalombaert/status/1754174978797220058

11/ He was then sent to "to Luhansk to see this pit where refuseniks are held, our guys are imprisoned, they took me to [penal colony] IK-15. That is, to see the conditions too. A basement. The guys are sitting there, there are bunks, there is a pallet on the walls, just a pit."

12/ "It was a basement, a basement room with no light, no nothing. It was in the basement of a building, an ordinary five-storey or nine-storey building."

13/ He was subsequently sent to a neuropsychiatric center in Luhansk, where he was handed over to doctors, and then transferred to a hospital in Samara in September 2024. However, he was refused treatment and faced demands for extortionately large bribes to be rated unfit:

14/ "I actually went there to be admitted, hoping to somehow get out of [the army] legally.But it didn't work out.I just showed up one day when I was supposed to be there, showed my documents, and they started picking on me, even going so far as to say I wasn't in uniform for…

15/ …some reason. A soldier, you're a soldier, for some reason I wasn't in uniform. So, I gave up, turned around, and left. I started looking for my own ways, and they charged me almost three or five million [$37,000-$62,000], sometimes even from neurologists I knew.

16/ "Where would that kind of money come from? And it wasn't a sure thing. And at the military registration and enlistment office, they charged me two million: 'We'll just forget about you completely.'

17/ "The price tags are like those of oligarchs. And there's no reliable way to avoid it."

In the end, unable to afford the bribes, he turned to the dissident group 'Go to the forest' for help to flee Russia and go abroad, which he managed to do by March 2025.

18/ Now living outside Russia in relative safety, the soldier urges others to follow in his footsteps. "I would urge everyone to abandon this army altogether—to desert, not to fight. This country will have no use for you."

19/ "Under no circumstances: don't sign a contract, don't go to fight, no matter what they promise you. There's only one thing there—death." /end

Source:
t.me/ne_zhdi_novost…