Bund and mistreated, traumatised soldiers are being flown back to the front under coercion and threats.
Hundreds of Russians who have refused to return to the war in Ukraine have been forcibly sent back, under threat of violence and weapons, a investigation reveals.
When Sergej Kruglyj returns home after six months at the front, he doesn't sleep for a month. One March night in 2023, he goes berserk in his mother's house, destroying everything he can get his hands on.
They're here, Aunt Katia! They're flying around! Close the window, close the window!
Kruglyj sinks to his knees and ducks from imaginary drones. He hallucinates, haunted by memories of the war:
I've walked around the entire field and gathered up heads. One of them had such white teeth. It was smiling. Its head was in my hands and it was smiling.
Tormented by severe PTSD, the 29-year-old chooses not to return to Ukraine, his family tells Russian independent Vjorstka. Six months later, the police show up at his mother's door and take him away. He is then sent to a military facility in Yekaterinburg, where he is locked up in a warehouse with other deserters.
Bodies in piles
Sergej Kruglyj is one of hundreds – possibly thousands – of Russian soldiers whose refusal to return to the war has had brutal consequences, according to Vjorstka's investigation. The site has gone through a number of cases where deserters have been denied the right to a legal process and instead forced back to the front.
Another of them is Vladimir Muronov. In 2022, he is recruited to a military medical unit, but after less than a day, he is sent into combat. After that, he has to gather up the remains of his dead comrades.
"The bodies are piled up everywhere. It starts to feel like they're my friends. It's fucked up", he writes home, according to Vjorstka.
When Muronov gets leave in June 2023, he returns home with constant tremors. Every time a car passes, he stares up at the sky, searching for drones and robots. His wife becomes pregnant, and he decides to desert. But when the baby is born in April this year, he is locked up in the same warehouse as Sergej Kruglyj.
Unconscious
In May, about 40 soldiers, equipped with machine guns and batons, storm into the warehouse. According to Vjorstka, which has spoken to witnesses and relatives, they load up to 180 men onto buses that drive directly to an airfield. The group is then mass-deported back to the front. Many of them are sick and injured and unfit for combat, according to the investigation. Others are knocked unconscious as they are thrown onto the plane.
The following week, at least 170 more men are deported under threat of violence from the warehouse. The group includes Sergej Kruglyj and Vladimir Muronov.
During the war, several other independent Russian media outlets, including Astra, have described similar treatment of deserters in other parts of Russia. The mass deportations are carried out on orders from Moscow, according to Vjorstka's sources.
More than 54,000 Russian soldiers have so far died in the war in Ukraine, according to an ongoing tally by the independent Russian news site Mediazona, in collaboration with the British BBC. The latest update was on May 24.
The largest category consists of soldiers recruited from Russian prisons.
The actual death toll is likely to be significantly higher, but there is no reliable Russian statistics available.
The recorded deaths are those that have been fully confirmed using open source data: relatives' posts on social media, local media reports, insurance documents or actual grave sites in Russian cemeteries.
In addition, there are tens of thousands of dead mercenaries from the paramilitary Wagner group.
Last week, Mediazona reported that over 10,000 Russians – most of whom have already been convicted – have been charged with war evasion since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
