The price Russian troops pay for deserting, defecting or disobeying orders from sledgehammer execution and forced fights to the death to freezing torture and rape

In January, horrifying footage emerged of two Russian fighters, both accused of desertion, taped to trees in freezing conditions on the frontline. 

One man was strapped to the tree upside down and stripped down to his underwear, while another was forced to choke on snow by his superior who barked obscenities at him.

The punishments may seem extreme, but those who are accused of desertion in Russia can be threatened with rape, forced into ‘gladiator-style’ fights to the death with fellow troops, and sometimes even executed with sledgehammers. 

In late August last year, in a separate incident, Ilya Gorkov’s commanders handcuffed him and a fellow soldier to a tree in eastern Ukraine for four days, abandoning them without food or water.

The punishment was triggered by the troops’ refusal to go on what they believed to be a suicide mission, involving taking a photo with a Russian flag on Ukrainian-held territory. 

Gorkov managed to film the ordeal and sent it to his mother, Oksana Krasnova, who immediately publicised the incident on social media and issued an impassioned complaint to the Russian human rights ombudsman, declaring: ‘They are not animals!’

Gorkov is but one of thousands of soldiers who have been tortured at the hands of commanders, who systematically use abuse as a way of coercing soldiers – even the gravely sick or wounded – into staying on the battlefield.

Those who are brave enough to disobey orders risk being dumped into ‘torture pits’ covered with metal grates, doused with water and beaten for days by ruthless officers.

In public, Vladimir Putin praises the troops fighting his war of attrition as sacred warriors, yet behind closed doors his war machine abuses its own soldiers to maintain its unrelenting assault on Kyiv.

The front is manned by men with canes and wheelchairs, who are missing limbs and suffering from debilitating PTSD, but face a whip on their back and a gun in their face if they refuse to fight. 

Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, over 50,000 of Putin’s soldiers have deserted, representing nearly 10 per cent of all Russian troops in Ukraine, according to a UN report from September 2025.

More than 16,000 military personnel have been prosecuted for desertion-related offences, with over 13,500 conscripts and contract soldiers convicted in 2024.

Despite the harsh consequences for defecting or disobeying orders, many soldiers – wearied by combat – are considering extreme options to escape the battlefield.

Indeed, according to an intercepted message provided to I Want To Live, a project set up in 2022 by Ukraine’s military intelligence which helps Russian soldiers safely surrender, soldiers are deliberately injuring themselves to leave the battlefield.

One frontline soldier, known only as ‘Viktor’, said morale among troops has dropped to such an all-time low that soldiers have contemplated blowing themselves up with grenades so that they will be taken off the frontline to recover in hospital. 

After four years of brutal combat, Russia has had about 1.2million casualties, including as many as 325,000 deaths, a report by the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found. 

Ukraine has suffered 600,000 casualties, including the killed, wounded, and missing, the report said, with President Volodymyr Zelensky recently announcing that 55,000 soldiers had been confirmed as dead.

The official number of dead cited by the Ukrainian leader is considerably lower than the country’s total losses, however. As he said himself, ‘a large number of people’ are registered as missing. 

In its ambition to keep fighting no matter what, Russia’s unforgiving military apparatus is no longer evacuating the wounded or psychologically traumatised, and is even sending former captives back to the frontline as quickly as a day after their release from Ukraine.

‘Given my psychological state, sending a former prisoner of war to an active combat zone is a rash decision,’ one Russian soldier who had been sent back to the battlefield after seven months in Ukrainian captivity wrote in a complaint to Moscow’s human rights ombudsman.

Thousands of such complaints were recently leaked and made accessible online, before being published by The New York Times after they were sent to the newspaper by Echo, an online Russian news outlet in Berlin.

‘How can I carry out the orders of the command if this whole situation is affecting me mentally?’ the former prisoner of war wrote in his complaint.

In footage showing the two soldiers tied to trees in the biting cold, their desperate pleas for mercy are ignored.

Instead, they are screamed at by their foul-mouthed commander, who shouts: ‘You need to work, not **** off. Did I tell you where to go?’

Later, he spits homophobic slurs at the men, saying: ‘You ****ing f*****s, **** off!’

Such violence against allegedly mutinous troops has been commonplace since the outbreak of war, and has only intensified as Putin’s insatiable demand for fighting men persists.

In 2022, a former Wagner group mercenary was beaten to death with a sledgehammer when he defected to the Ukrainian side in a harrowing ordeal that was filmed and circulated on the Telegram messaging app.

Yevgeny Nuzhin, 55, was a convicted murderer and was serving a 24-year-long sentence when he was plucked from prison and hired by Wagner group to deploy to Ukraine in an effort to bolster Putin’s faltering war effort.

He was understood to have defected soon after arriving on the frontline, but was later kidnapped by pro-Kremlin forces and killed in revenge for his decision.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late founder of the infamous Wagner group, coldly responded to the clip by saying that ‘a dog receives a dog’s death’.

‘Nuzhin betrayed his people, betrayed his comrades, betrayed consciously,’ he said at the time, concluding: ‘Nuzhin was a traitor.’

After legislative amendments in 2024, convicts could have their sentences commuted or prosecutions dropped for signing military contracts, expanding Putin’s recruitment pool as manpower wanes.

Since 2022, approximately 200,000 inmates have been recruited, according to the UN.

Investigative journalists at Verstka have claimed that by February 2025, over 750 people had been killed or severely injured by returning combatants, including 378 deaths and 376 life-threatening injuries. 

In September 2024, a cannibal serving 25 years in jail was freed after fighting on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Independent outlet Verstka recently uncovered the existence of blocking units stationed behind Russian lines to prevent retreats – with soldiers being shot by their own side if they tried to flee.

Witnesses said commanders had appointed ‘execution shooters’ to open fire on refusers, later dumping their bodies in shallow graves or rivers and registering them as killed in action.

In some cases, officers allegedly used drones and explosives to ‘finish off’ wounded or retreating soldiers, even ordering drone operators to drop grenades on their comrades to disguise the killings as battlefield strikes.

Others who disobeyed orders were stripped naked and stuffed into pits. ‘They’re treating us like dogs. They held me in a pit for a week and a half,’ one soldier wrote in a text message to his mother, that was included in a complaint sent to the ombudsman.

One such case appeared in a video circulated in May 2025 by Ukrainian groups monitoring Russian forces. 

The footage shows two shirtless men in a pit, as a voice off-camera says: ‘Commander Kama basically said whoever beats the other one to death gets out of the pit.’ 

The men begin to fight as the officer continues to taunt them, saying: ‘Finish him off already, what are you waiting for?’

Eventually, one man collapses motionless on the ground.

Verstka said it had verified at least 150 such deaths and identified 101 servicemen accused of murdering, torturing or fatally punishing fellow troops, though the true number is thought to be far higher.

Witnesses claimed that commanders also ran financial extortion schemes in which officers demanded payments from soldiers in exchange for avoiding suicide missions. 

Those who could not pay, or refused, are ‘zeroed out’ – a practice that has become so common in Putin’s war machine that it has its own nickname in the military.

To be ‘zeroed out’ can mean getting a lethal order to go on a perilous assault where soldiers are expected to surely die. It can also involve the direct killing of soldiers by their fellow troops on the battlefield. 

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied allegations of indiscipline among Russian troops, insisting that such problems are ‘rife’ within the Ukrainian army instead.

Last year, horrifying footage emerged of Putin’s uniformed thugs beating wounded soldiers as a way to get them to return to the frontline.

The video shows a military police officer beating a traumatised troop with a truncheon, before tasing him with a stun gun in the Russian region of Tuva.

The victims are also bombarded with verbal threats, including that they would be stripped and raped.

One of the soldiers in the clip had his spine broken, according to social activist Vitaly Borodin, who highlighted the graphic footage.

The Russian authorities only initiated an investigation after the footage went viral, although complaints of such brutality by Putin’s enforcers frequently go unnoticed. 

Gorkov, the Russian soldier who managed to film himself being handcuffed to a tree in summer last year, was only released thanks to a relative with connections in the security services.

He said he had hired a lawyer and was refusing to return to his unit, because doing so ‘would be like signing my own death warrant’, he told the New York Times.

‘People in wheelchairs are being sent to the front, without arms or legs,’ he said. ‘I saw it all with my own eyes.’