“As a rule, they do not make it”

ASTRA found out what is happening in the 25th brigade, where the military “disappears” at the front, and the command sends people without eyes, on crutches and with hepatitis into battle.

Vladimir lost his left eye during the first month of service.

His wife Lydia says that he “didn’t really have any training”: Vladimir signed the contract on October 3rd, and he spent about two weeks at the training ground. According to medical documents, Vladimir was injured on October 21st – Lydia says that a Ukrainian drone dropped a bomb into a dugout. Vladimir received shrapnel wounds to the entire left side of his body, “severe contusion of the left orbit <…> penetrating wound to the left eyeball with its destruction” – it is written in the conclusion of the medical examination.

– Vova was pulled out during the day under the quadrocopters. Thank God, they were evacuated. There was a guy with the call sign “Surprise” with him – God rest his soul, he himself died 2 days later – so, he kept my husband conscious during the evacuation,” says Lydia.

She recounts her husband’s words: During the evacuation, doctors told Vladimir that he would not return to the combat zone after such an injury. At the medical examination, he was given the category “G” – temporarily unfit.

In January, Vladimir found himself with colleagues in St. Petersburg. “We went on a spree. We didn’t get to Rostov, but at least we returned to the unit on time. They were told: “Please go to the “SMO” zone. <…> The last time we spoke was on February 13th, at the same time his phone was taken away, he was already “behind the ribbon,” Lydia says. Instead of the front line, Vladimir was suposed to go to a medical examination and get an eye prosthesis.

Lydia herself comes from a military family, says that she is “not a little girl”, and understands perfectly well that in war you can stay out of touch for many months. “In the second half of May, the payment did not come. Then I really started twitching. I’m calling the unit, and they tell me that Vova has the status of “missing” since April 5.” However, this date has changed several times.

Lydia is one of the signatories of the collective complaint from the relatives and friends of the fighters of military unit 29760. The list of applicants includes relatives of 83 military personnel. ASTRA verified them. With rare exceptions, all of them are missing – either formally or only in the words of the command (for example, according to the hotline of the Ministry of Defense, Lydia’s husband is still in service). At the same time, some women managed to confirm the death of their loved ones through their colleagues.

Most of the military personnel mentioned in the complaint are contractors, 20 of them are mobilized. Their relatives complain that the men “were transferred to stormtroopers regardless of their previously assigned military specialty.” In the 25th brigade, soldiers had to buy cars and spare parts for them, uniforms, medicines and much more at their own expense, the complaint says. Some of the sick get to the “front line”, and the wounded “have to wait weeks for evacuation and [may] never get it.” After the disappearance of the military, their relatives have not been able to achieve even an informal recognition of missing persons for months.

“The vast majority of them did not leave the field after their first battles in the Kupyansk direction: the village of Sinkovka, the village of Olshana and the First Liman. It should be noted that in these areas, the evacuation of the bodies of the dead is practically not carried out,” the collective complaint says.

The information provided in the document by ASTRA was confirmed by relatives of 7 military personnel on the list. They sent the complaint to “about 30 addresses – to the Ministry of Defense, the prosecutor’s Office, the presidential administration, the investigative committee, various public figures, deputies, by regions and regions – some in Komi, some in Kemerovo,” says one of the applicants, Anna.

The most famous basement of the “LPR”

Nikita signed the contract on April 10 of this year and immediately got to the location of the 25th brigade. His girlfriend Olesya says that before being sent to the front, she and the young man wanted to get married. It didn’t work out – the young man was sent to Moscow immediately after signing the contract. Olesya was refused marriage at the registry office without a contract in her hands. At the training ground in Kursk, she was allowed to come to the man to get married and become his proxy, but on the day of departure Nikita called and said that “they are taking his phone and sending him to the front line – without any preparation or even cohesion,” says Olesya.

Nikita went to war healthy, but according to the documents, on April 23 he was diagnosed with hepatitis C. “How he got infected, we do not know. I don’t want to slander anyone, but for the first time on the “front” he carried a bloody boy with non-working legs on himself, then there were a lot of wounded in the field hospital, doctors tried to help everyone, there was the same tool somewhere, and so on,” says Olesya.

Nikita was supposed to be treated for hepatitis C, but instead he was returned to the front line several more times. He is currently in the hospital and is awaiting his return to the front. “When we wrote the first health report, the attitude immediately changed dramatically for the worse. According to Nikita, the commander told him that he didn’t care about hepatitis at all, go die – and that’s it.”

According to the schedule of illnesses, military lawyer Maxim Grebenyuk explains, Nikita with hepatitis C should have been given the category of fitness “B” – limited fit for service. In the case of Vladimir, who lost his eye, things are more complicated: “If one eye is missing, and the second one sees well, then this is category “B” – suitable with minor restrictions,” says Grebenyuk.

– I have met military men with hepatitis who were sent to the “front line” with various injuries, on crutches. Yes, I literally saw a military man on crutches. I do not know where exactly he was sent,” an active military officer from the 25th brigade told ASTRA.

This attitude is explained by the fact that the 25th brigade is an assault unit, relatives of the military told ASTRA. The command sends motley groups of mobilized, contract soldiers and prisoners to the assaults. “The command doesn’t care what condition a person is in. They need a body, that’s all,” says Lydia.

– The guys tell such things: commanders from the 25th brigade come to the training ground and silently take away men. Sometimes without documents, they continue to be registered at homebase, but in fact they are in the 25th brigade. People can’t find any clues, they don’t know where their loved ones are. We have a girl, in the 25th brigade they admit that her relative is missing, and in their native unit they claim that he is in the ranks,” says Anna, whose brother, a contractor, has been missing for six months.

It is not known for certain under what conditions the 25th brigade takes the military for assaults. However, the Russian army has a practice of “buying out” stormtroopers. For example, last year the volunteer detachment “Veterans” bought 500 mobilized at 25 thousand rubles “per head” and sent them to storm Bakhmut in the first line. This was announced in a video message by relatives of the military. The further fate of the overbought mobilized is unknown.

It is not uncommon for military personnel of other units to get into the 25th brigade for violating discipline. According to ASTRA, often “penal guards” get into the 25th brigade through the torture cellar in Zaitsevo “LNR” – this is an illegal prison for “refuseniks” and violators of discipline, where the military are held before being sent to the assaults. That is how, at the end of 2023, 20 soldiers from other military units joined the 25th brigade. After Zaitsevo, the military disappeared from communication. Later, in the military unit 29760, relatives were informed that the men were missing.

In a conversation with ASTRA, the relatives of these 20 missing soldiers repeated the claims set out in the complaint against the 25th brigade. Including endless confusion with documents: for example, the wife of the military Dmitry Zharkov told the editorial board that due to a legal error, she has not received payments for her husband for 8 months. The military unit simply did not record that she was his wife.

Without communication

Once at the location of the 25th brigade, the military abruptly disappears from communication. Contract employee Sergei, during a call to his wife Marina from the training ground, said that the command “takes away the phones and smashes them against the wall.” The woman claims that her husband spent only 3 days training. “What can you teach in three days?! He told me that they were mostly running around the landings there, shooting at each other with blanks. We fooled around a little at the tank and watched it shoot. I asked about drones, he replied that they were told there: if you see a drone, fall down and pretend to be dead, maybe you will survive, otherwise he will fly after you and kill you. And that’s all the training,” says Marina.

The last time her husband contacted her was on February 8, when he was being driven towards the front line. A few weeks later, she started worrying and calling the military unit. In April, she turned to public figure Alexander Makarov from the Veterans Council. “He said that he had put pressure on the military unit and that my husband would be recognized as missing on May 15. The losses there are catastrophic, but they are not advertised. At the same time, they kept telling me in the military unit that my husband was active. I even called them on May 16 and he was still considered active by them!” says Marina.

From the testimonies of relatives of the military of the 25th brigade, it is obvious that the status of “missing” is assigned to military personnel almost on arbitrary dates. You can understand the status of your loved one only by payments. “Many of us do not receive combat training for 3-4 months, although their husbands are in the ranks. They receive only a monetary allowance – without deductions, this is about 40 thousand rubles,” says Anna.

The military is considered missing after the order of command. “After about six months, you can apply for recognition of death, if there is sufficient evidence. This can be done by relatives or the command. According to the law, it is not possible to immediately recognize someone as dead: either a body must be found, or six months must have passed,” explains lawyer Grebenyuk. If, according to unit records, the military person disappeared outside the battle zone, the time for recognition is extended. While the person is missing, they are only entitled to allowances and not combat payments.

– I have never experienced an assault, but I understand that they are senseless. People are pushed into assaults without any support, only to be slaughtered. From what I have heard, two or three people are coming, with machine guns, drones, and everything is against them. Artillery is firing, and somehow they have to go to the position. As a rule, they don’t make it,” said the acting military member of the 25th Brigade to ASTRA.

“They have told me such stories. It’s terrible. In February, there were still trees in the Kupyansk area, and now it’s a field torn apart by trenches, where bodies have lain since winter. Maybe thousands of them. The soldiers are coming back, they’re sick. And there’s nowhere to hide in that scorched field; you feel like a flea on the palm of someone’s hand,” says the relative of a missing soldier, relaying the words of a serving soldier from the 25th Brigade (ASTRA has chosen to withhold the soldier’s name due to a criminal article on “discrediting the military”).

In the absence of official information, families of military personnel are conducting their own investigations. They are interviewing colleagues and watching Ukrainian Telegram channels with videos of prisoners and photos of Russian soldiers’ bodies. The largest Telegram chat about the search for servicemen from the 25th Brigade consists of more than 1,500 people. Since the spring, the chat administrator has posted messages about the deaths of 72 military personnel. Usually, only call signs are mentioned in the messages, rather than names, which can be seen on the uniforms of the dead servicemen.

In one of the videos from Ukrainian captivity, a woman named Lydia found a man who, it seems to her, resembles her husband. However, his face is hidden behind a hood and his eyes are not visible due to the disguise. During a conversation with a journalist from ASTRA, Lydia hung up the phone several times to answer other calls from unknown numbers. “I’m always on call. You never know who might be calling from the hospital or from work, so you never know who it might be,” she said. Her husband had disappeared five months earlier.

Author: Andrey Kaganskikh