1/ A civil engineer who was mobilised into the Russian army despite ill-health has escaped to Germany and spoken about the chaos and brutality he saw. His regiment was told by its commander: "You came here to die." He was later arrested and tortured for trying to flee. ⬇️
2/ 44-year-old Georgy from Lyubertsy near Moscow has told his story to Radio Free Europe. He was mobilised in September 2022 despite serious heart problems and was sent to a training ground where he "wandered aimlessly" and "fired a few times from rusty automatic rifles".
3/ He had protested against being mobilised but was assured initially that he would be sent to a construction battalion, where his skills as a civil engineer would be valuable. Despite this, he was sent to a front-line Russian unit fighting in Ukraine in November 2022.
4/ "The feeling was that no one knows anything, terrible chaos, no coordination, no supplies… It was as if we were transported in a time machine to 1941, when the Germans were advancing on Moscow, complete chaos, only the form was different.
5/ "Late autumn, rain, mud, muddy roads, destroyed villages, war passed over the land."
6/ He and his comrades were sent to a forest near Svatove in the Luhansk region, without raincoats or tools to chop wood for shelters. They bought supplies from local people at their own expense.
7/ "The first days were like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island – surviving in the wild without anything, they didn’t give us anything, we slept on the ground in the rain and snow, lit fires. And I was thinking about how to escape from there.
8/ "I immediately realized that this was a one-way ticket. Judging by the attitude of the officers, the command staff, it was clear that they weren’t considering us as a combat unit, as soldiers,...
9/ ...they had simply brought a portion of cannon fodder that had to play its role and die heroically. It was clear from how they saved on supplies – why feed them and water them if they would be killed tomorrow?
10/ "In the neighbouring forest, there were [Chechen] Akhmatovites and air defence men – and judging by the equipment, it was clear who needed to be protected and who didn’t."
11/ The area was the focus of heavy fighting at the time. At one point his regimental commander, Colonel General Alexander Zavadsky, turned up to give a motivational speech.
12/ "He lined everybody up and said: ‘You came here to die.’ At least he was honest. ‘If you want to go on holiday - 300‘, i.e. wounded, “if you want to go for good – 200”, i.e. killed,’ he said. That's the kind of motivational speech it was."
13/ Georgy managed to escape from the disorganised encampment and hitched a lift to Troitske in the northern Luhansk region, near the Russian border, which was equally chaotic.
14/ "There was Brownian motion – a bunch of mobilised people, no one had anything, everyone was spreading out to neighbouring cities and villages in search of food and materials to set up their daily lives.
15/ "They would arrive in the city, not have time to go to the store – they needed somewhere to spend the night. Some officers tried to help their soldiers, but not all of them – and the hospital’s emergency room was turned into a flophouse."
16/ A local man helped Georgy and three others to travel to a point near the border, which was sealed with a barbed-wire fence. While they were crossing it, a Russian helicopter spotted them and opened fire, killing two of the escapees.
17/ Georgy and the other survivor were captured by FSB border guards and were taken back across the border, where they were imprisoned in an army-run torture centre in a basement in the Luhansk region village of Rozsypne.
18/ The site is a former Ukrainian border service facility which President Zelensky visited in November 2020. It has now been repurposed by the Russian army as a place of pain and terror.
19/ Georgy describes it as "A brand new building, the basement has sandy floors. They nailed together bunks, divided the space in half: for the 'good' ones, who could be re-educated, where I ended up, and for the 'bad' ones, who, as I understood, were not needed."
20/ "People were beaten to death there: we were taken there to clean up, there was even blood on the ceiling. You sit in a stone cell, they take you out to the toilet in the morning and evening, there is no connection with the outside world.
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