The Moscow Times, an independent news outlet now operating outside Russia, reported:
Sibir.Realii reported on Friday that only a few unit members are still alive, with much of the regiment being wiped out after being ordered to storm a fortified area in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine on Wednesday.
While a few fighters apparently survived the mission with injuries, the unit's other servicemen, who are currently listed as missing are believed to have been killed, according to their relatives, Sibir.Realii said.
"My [husband] called back — [he] has a shrapnel [wound], in the hospital. He says there is nothing left of the regiment. Only two wounded are known [to have survived] so far, the rest are either dead or were left there in a difficult situation," the wife of one of the conscripts told Sibir.Realii.
She claimed her wounded husband had already been told he would be sent back to the front line again in a week.
The Irkutsk conscripts, who said they were from regiment 1439, made two video appeals to Putin—at the end of January and in late February. They said they had been initially trained to serve as territorial defense troops, but instead were placed under the command of officers from the Donetsk People’s Republic, the self-proclaimed separatist entity whose territory was annexed by Russia last year.
In their last video appeal to Putin, published on Telegram by the group Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal), the Irkutsk conscripts said they arrived in the Donetsk region on Dec. 31, after making a journey of nearly 2,500 miles from the city of Novosibirsk in Siberia.
Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet now operating out of Latvia, provided this report on the soldiers’ video. (Meduza has granted open access to its coverage of the war in Ukraine.) The source was a report released on Feb. 26 by People of Baikal:
Mobilized soldiers from Russia’s Irkutsk region recorded a video appeal to Vladimir Putin, asking him to “deal with lawless and criminal orders from command.” The news outlet Lyudi Baikala published the video.
The draftees claim that the were transferred to the First Slavic Brigade of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic,” where command created “assault units in one day” from their ranks, and then sent them to storm the Avdiivka fortified area without any support, artillery, communications, sappers, or reconnaissance.
“Command told us directly that we are expendable, and that the only chance we have of returning home is getting injured,” the soldiers say. They also report that commanders from the self-proclaimed DNR fired machine guns and infantry fighting vehicles at draftees who refused to join the assault units.
The draftees add that their battalion is “almost completely destroyed,” and that they suffer heavy losses every day because command doesn’t know the “real” situation at the front.
Governor of Irkutsk Igor Kobzev promised that the soldiers would be transferred to a different location in the near future and he would have things under control. But Kobzev clearly didn’t have “the situation under control” because within days of the soldiers’ appeal to Putin, many of them had reportedly been killed in action.
Back in November, Kobzev, a general and a former deputy head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, met with mothers of fallen troops and bluntly told them that Russian soldiers who die in combat in Ukraine “belong to the state.” The Moscow Times reported:
Quoting his own mother's words to him when he enrolled in a military academy, Kobzev, 56, said:
“From now on you don’t belong to me, you belong to the state, the homeland.”
“With honor and great understanding, I hand over an 18-year-old boy into service in the Armed Forces and you’re becoming a person of the state.”
At the meeting, Kobzev awarded medals to the fallen soldiers’ mothers and claimed that only 28 Irkutsk region natives have died in Ukraine.
Independent media outlets tracking Russia's military deaths say 122 servicemen from the Irkutsk region have died in Ukraine since February.
Many more soldiers from Irkutsk have died since that meeting. On Feb. 24—the first anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine—the U.S. State Department added Kobzev’s name along with those of all other Russian Federation governors to its sanctions list, citing “their duties (in) the conscription of citizens to fight in Ukraine.”
Late Monday, another group of conscripts in a video posted to Telegram claimed that they were also forced to join an “assault brigade” from the Donetsk People’s Republic and sent into combat without proper training, Meduza reported. The conscripts were from the Belgorod region bordering northeastern Ukraine.
The soldiers said they had been serving in a territorial defense unit in the border village of Shebekino, but in early March, they were redeployed to the Donetsk region “with no orders or explanations.” Meduza reported:
The draftees allege that when they arrived in occupied Ukraine, their military IDs were taken by “militiamen” from the “DNR.” After that, they say, they were sent to “storm villages” with no training, intel about their targets, or means of communication.
The men say in the clip that their platoon has already suffered casualties. They note that they’re not refusing to perform their assigned tasks, but that they only want to do so as part of the Russian Armed Forces.
These videos may reflect growing discontent among mobiks who are being used as cannon fodder in hastily formed “assault detachments.” These new units are replacing the depleted Battalion Tactical Groups which suffered heavy losses of personnel and equipment over months of fighting. The assault detachments rely on dismounted infantry with tanks providing fire support from the rear.
The Modern War Institute at West Point, in an analysis published in January, said Russia is “attempting to fight a costly, prolonged conflict with a pickup team of replacements while suffering from severe battlefield leadership attrition.”
The Modern War Institute added that Russia “has responded to battlefield struggles in Ukraine by turning to its past model of fielding a large conscript force. In some ways this mirrors the tension between Russia’s pursuit of a technologically sophisticated way of war and its longstanding bias for simple, rugged mass.”
Here is a Twitter thread on how these assault detachments are supposed to operate in theory, but it’s doubtful these units in the field have all the equipment listed in the manuals.
And what that means in practical terms is that inexperienced and untrained mobiks are being used as cannon fodder in wave after wave of infantry attacks on fortified Ukrainian positions. Family members back home are starting to realize this. Last month, the wives of the Irkutsk conscripts sent a written appeal from the soldiers to Russia’s Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office.
The independent Russian news outlet Novaya Gazeta, also operating outside Russia, reported about the written appeal on Feb. 27. It read:
“When we are unable to comply with an order, we receive death threats. Example: “if you go under the article for desertion, you will have trouble with the commandant’s office and the military police, we will disband you two by two and send you on an offensive from which you will not return,” the mobilized wrote.
The appeal also says that the evacuation groups of the “DNR” take only their own fighters and military personnel with minor injuries from the battlefield. According to the mobilized, seriously wounded and killed Russian soldiers are not evacuated, because "they are afraid to lose equipment."
The appeal also says that the political officer of the 1439 regiment with the call sign "Rock" tried to explain to the command that "yesterday's drivers, welders, furniture makers and metal scrapers cannot belong to the elite attack aircraft unit and do not have the skills for this." After that, he was "detained, his weapons were taken away from him and taken away in an unknown direction."
The true death toll of Russian soldiers in Ukraine is unknown. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense puts the total number of Russians killed in action since Feb. 24 at more than 153,000. Ukraine does not provide any figures for Russians wounded in combat.
On Feb. 2, The New York Times reported that the number of Russian troops killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching 200,000, according to American and other Western officials. On Feb. 28, Insider cited an analysis from the Center for Strategic & International Studies:
More Russian soldiers have died in combat in Ukraine than in all of its wars since World War II combined, a new analysis has revealed.
According to a brief from the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), between 60,000 and 70,000 Russian soldiers have been killed on the battlefield in Ukraine. Moscow's troops are dying each month at a rate "at least 25 times the number killed per month in Chechnya and 35 times the number killed in Afghanistan," the analysis said, citing two particularly deadly wars for Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, respectively.
The question is what will be the reaction, if any, to the deaths of the Irkutsk conscripts who made the video appeals to Putin. They were sent several thousand miles from their homes in Siberia only to be slaughtered in Ukraine. On Feb. 24, there was only a small protest in the city of Irkutsk to mark the one-year anniversary of the war.
On March 3, the wives and sisters of Russian soldiers mobilized from the Irkutsk region recorded their own video message to Putin to save the lives of those of their men who remain alive. The women said they were able to contact some relatives from the 1439th regiment who survived the March 1 assault and were surrounded, under constant shelling, without water and food. The women said the command has forbidden the surrounded soldiers from leaving their positions and does not provide any support. “Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin]! We appeal to you from Svirsk, Irkutsk oblast. You are our last hope. Help, save our men!”