Russians are killing their own: journalists found out who is engaged in executions in the Russian Armed Forces - investigation
Then the soldiers were shot on the spot for refusing to go to the assault or drunkenness in the trenches. By 2025, executions and torture in the army have become more sophisticated, and personal enmity of soldiers with commanders and refusal to pay tribute to their superiors and refusal to pay tribute to superiors lead to them more and more often, Verstka reports. "A boy from my platoon was beaten to death with his head on the floor. Because he drank vodka after a combat mission.
That is, we sat at the front for a month without communication, without food, there were almost all 200 or 300 of us. We drank water from puddles, slept in the water. And then we went to rest, all the grown men, well, drank a little, and they started scolding us, like some kind of puppies. Well, the boy got mad," the journalists quoted one of the witnesses as saying. According to him, the Russian soldier was first killed, then thrown into a pit, and then shot.
According to him, commanders of the Russian Armed Forces under the callsigns "Kemer", "Dudka" and "Akula" were engaged in this. "Shark" is Ilhom Peter, a 34-year-old resident of the Orenburg region. He commands the stormtroopers of the 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division of the Center group. "Kemer" is 34-year-old Dmytro Kemerov, he commands the assault company "B". "Dudka" is 42-year-old deputy company commander Mykhailo Dudukov.
For the most part, the assault company consists of former prisoners. The witness managed to free himself after being wounded, so he dared to talk to journalists. But, according to reporters, there are hundreds of such "zeroers" in the Russian army. They complain to the military prosecutor's office, but often to no avail. "Two other interlocutors of "Verstka" from the same regiment are in the hospital and also expect to be released. They hope that they will not be returned to the front.
The fighters from the front line are afraid to speak. Because for expressing dissatisfaction or complaints to relatives or to the military prosecutor's office, they will be dismissed," the journalists note. According to them, "zeroing" is not only direct murder. A popular way to get rid of a disagreeable soldier in the Russian army is to send him into such an assault where it is almost impossible to survive, often without body armor and without weapons.
For example, in the 114th separate motorized rifle brigade (114 omsbr) of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Igor "Said" Istratiy, who received the Hero of Russia medal, is engaged in similar work. A certain Yuriy, who served in the 114th brigade, tells how they were sent to assaults without weapons and equipment, and "Said" said that the soldiers had to "get everything they needed in battle". "We marched with four horns of 120 rounds against two or three platoons.
This was the first battle in the winter of 2023, when we were just entering Krasnohorivka, there were 47 of us. Five of them descended into the village itself. Three minutes of battle," the Russian said. It is theoretically possible to refuse "meat assaults" in the Russian army, but then the refuser will be shot by his own people.
Another witness said that during the storming of the village of Orihovoy in Donetsk region, a certain "Fixa" refused to be a "beacon" - when a soldier is made a live bait, sent forward to provoke the enemy to open fire, and thus find out his exact location. "You just run in one direction, there's a blocking squad behind you, it won't let you go back. Your only chance to survive is to get wounded and get captured," said a Russian soldier. "Fiksa" was eventually beaten and shot.
Relatives were told that the man allegedly left a part of his own accord. As the mobilized Oleksii says, his brigade has a territorial defense battalion (12th armored personnel carrier), and it has a commander with the call sign "White". Everyone who refused a combat mission or otherwise "mown down" was sent to him. For such people, according to the interlocutor of "Verstka", "White" had two snipers who cleaned up the objectionable.
Oleksiy says that in 2023 snipers of the "White" commander killed twenty of his colleagues, in 2024 - 40 people. Executions with the help of drones are also common in the Russian Armed Forces: "There were such combat missions as storming forest regiments, and there was such an order: to zero their own if they could not get out. Those who did not do this were also zeroed, finished off with drops.
The drone fighters were intimidated, they stood under the muzzles of machine guns," said another interlocutor of the journalists. His colleague even complained to Putin, but to no avail. In the Russian army, it is also popular to put them in a pit or "in the basement", where they can starve or drown. "When two or three people remain in the pit, they are told: "Guys, if you want to get out, then fight. "Whoever stays will get out," said another interlocutor of the journalists.
However, captured Russians also talked about this. A similar video also appeared on social networks in the spring of 2025. The reason for "zeroing" is often money. Russian soldiers say that commanders sell the opportunity not to go on an assault, demand bribes, announce extortions and transfer salaries from the cards of contractors to their accounts. Those who refuse to pay are zeroed out in the above ways.
One of these commanders, Kurabek "Kurort" Karaev from Dagestan, even became the hero of a propaganda film by Volodymyr Solovyov. During the three years of the war in Ukraine, Kurort, who started fighting as a major, early earned the rank of lieutenant colonel and colonel, two Orders of Courage and a medal "For bravery". We will remind you that earlier Focus wrote about the investigation of the German journalist Julian Repke, who tried to understand why the Russians were killing their wounded.