‘This is a one-way ticket’

Inside the Russian military unit that’s lost so many soldiers it’s known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle’

Around 120,000 Russian soldiers have died fighting in Ukraine since Moscow began its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Analysts estimate that Russia loses 200–250 troops every day, and casualties have increased significantly in recent months. After capturing the city of Avdiivka in February, Russian forces launched a massive offensive all along the front line and opened a new front in the Kharkiv region. The independent journalism cooperative Bereg set out to investigate the cost of this offensive for one brigade known for its particularly high death tolls and the cruelty with which its commanders, who hail from the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic,” treat their Russian recruits. Journalist Lilia Yapparova also learned about how senior officers extort these soldiers, capturing large sums of money (including the very benefits offered as incitements to serve) in exchange for safer assignments and access to promised compensation. The following English-language translation has been abridged for length and clarity.

Beginning in January 2023, a group of mobilized soldiers from Russia’s Irkutsk region released a series of videos recounting how they were being thrown “to the slaughter.” Appealing to Vladimir Putin himself, the soldiers described being sent into frontal assaults with no preparation or artillery support. By March, nearly all of them were dead.

The soldiers belonged to the 1st Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade, a Russian military unit also known as the 1st Slavyansk Brigade. And it was thanks to these videos that the unit developed a reputation for its particularly high mortality rate. Family members said they’ve also struggled to obtain reliable information from the unit’s command staff about deceased soldiers. Many of the dead have been classified as missing in action (or as deserters) for years, they said.

Established in 2014, the 1st Slavyansk Brigade spent eight years fighting in Ukraine’s east as part of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DNR). When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, its proxy authorities in Donetsk mobilized locals to replenish the brigade’s ranks. The unit would go on to suffer heavy losses during the siege of Mariupol and during subsequent attempts to storm Avdiivka and Ukrainian Armed Forces positions in Vodyane and Opytne (villages on the outskirts of Donetsk).

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Mobilized and “volunteer” soldiers from Russia joined the depleted brigade after it was folded into the Russian army in January 2023 (the first recruits came from the Irkutsk region). But the same “separatist officers” from Donbas still made up the backbone of the unit’s command.

Since then, the brigade has continued to fight on the Avdiivka front under the Russian army code name “Military Unit 41680.” Over the course of the past two and a half years, it’s managed to advance about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in total.

‘Maybe my little brother’s still alive?’

Thirty-year-old Igor Anistratenko’s body lay near the village of Vodyane for over a year. His family spent all that time searching for him, but they had little information to go on, his stepmother Svetlana told Bereg.

Svetlana learned from Igor’s fellow soldiers that he was last seen “lying on the ground with his eyes open” after coming under fire in mid-March 2023. Igor had also mentioned Vodyane during their last phone conversation. At the time, Russian forces were trying to advance on nearby Avdiivka, sending wave after wave of soldiers to storm the city — and suffering huge losses in the process.

“For some reason, he really wanted to go to the front. To see the colors of life,” Svetlana recalled. “We tried to talk him out of it, but he wasn’t discouraged. There was nothing keeping him here, after all. He didn’t have a family of his own — no wife, no girlfriend.”

Igor died on his first combat mission; it was his third day serving in the 1st Slavyansk Brigade. His body wasn’t found until the spring of 2024. An investigator called his family in April and said a “skeleton with glasses” had been identified as Igor by his army badge (this has yet to be confirmed by DNA analysis). “He shouldn’t have been [sent] into that offensive, because of his eyesight,” Svetlana said. “But his brigade didn’t have enough people, and they simply shoved [anyone and] everyone where they needed them.”

The 1st Slavyansk Brigade continued to fight near Avdiivka for another year after Igor’s death. Marcel Kashapov, a contract soldier from Russia’s Bashkortostan, disappeared on the same front on March 10, 2024. It was his first combat mission, too. “Allegedly, Marcel was killed by a drone near Avdiivka and [his body] remained in the dugout, covered in earth,” his sister Vinera told Bereg. “But if he died, where’s the body? Maybe my little brother is still alive.”

After Russian forces captured Avdiivka on February 17, 2024, the 1st Slavyansk Brigade moved to cut off the Ukrainian army’s supply routes outside the city — and the unit’s soldiers continued to disappear. Kemerovo resident Yevgenia said her husband called her to say goodbye during a combat mission on April 27. “He said they were being shelled and couldn’t go any further,” she recalled.

Another soldier, who used the call sign “Next,” called his younger sister Natalya on the eve of an assault on May 19. “[He said], ‘Light a candle for me. I’m starting to realize this is a one-way ticket,” Natalya told Bereg, recounting their last conversation.

Natalya, who lives in Yurga (Kemerovo region), said her brother — a 51-year-old veteran of Russia’s 1994 peacekeeping mission in Georgia’s breakaway Abkhazia region — was sent to Ukraine within three days of being called up. After his disappearance, she found out he had been wounded and hospitalized prior to the combat mission. “[He had] a knee injury and an arm injury. Nothing was fully treated, and the shrapnel wasn’t removed. And that’s how he went into that assault — lame, with a bandaged leg,” she said.

The brigade replied to Natalya’s inquiries about her brother with two short phrases: “We’re doing everything possible” and “Sometimes, guys come back.” “At that point, I wanted to ask if they’ve seen the drone videos of abandoned [soldiers] being finished off,” she told Bereg. “It’s horrible to look at, but every day I check [a Telegram] channel with unidentified corpses [and] prisoners of war. It makes my hair stand on end.”

Igor from Omsk enlisted in the Russian army on April 10. He went missing during the same assault as “Next” on May 19, and his wife Tatyana is still looking for him. During their last conversation, he said he was going to take part in a nighttime assault on Netailove, another village near Avdiivka that Russian troops occupied one week after Igor’s disappearance. “The brigade commander said my husband wasn’t listed among the ‘200s’ or the ‘300s’,” Tatyana said, using the Russian military slang for killed and wounded soldiers.

The missing soldiers’ loved ones have organized their own search effort, exchanging photographs, call signs, and commanders’ phone numbers on social media. Bereg spoke to several dozen of these families. They referred to the 1st Slavyansk Brigade as the “Bermuda Triangle” because its soldiers tend to disappear or die so quickly that little is known about the unit itself.

‘The Russian meat has arrived’

Maxim Bykov, a soldier from the village of Semenovka in Russia’s Saratov region, is one of the few who managed to share a detailed account of his time in the 1st Slavyansk Brigade. He enlisted in the Russian army on May 13, 2023, because he needed to pay alimony. His family last heard from him on June 6, 2024.

Bykov and his fellow new recruits were put under the command of “officers” from the DNR. Their commander greeted them by saying, “The Russian meat has arrived,” his sister Tatyana Anufrieva told Bereg.

The brigades attached to the DNR’s “people’s militia” suffered heavy losses at the start of the full-scale invasion and, according to Anufrieva, the commanders resented the mobilized Russians who were sent to replenish their ranks. “The commanders live with their families in Donetsk and hate our guys because they’ve been fighting there for 10 years [while] we were sitting and waiting,” she explained.

The relatives of multiple soldiers said the commanders called the new recruits “Moskals” (a derogatory term for Russians) and “screamed in their faces,” saying, “You came here to make money? Then go work — your families will rejoice at the millions [in compensation for your death].”

The new recruits were sent to storm Ukrainian positions every two to four days “without a break,” Anufrieva said. “My brother would come back from a combat mission and that same night — wounded or not — they’d send him out again on an evacuation mission to ‘extract your own.’”

The commanders paid no mind to the losses among the mobilized Russians, sending them to carry out assaults without artillery support. According to Anufrieva, those who refused were beaten and threatened with “zeroing” — a slang term for execution. “They didn’t kill them right there at the base, they’d take them to a field in their underwear and a T-shirt. They’d give them a knife or a sapper’s shovel — and that was it, goodbye. They didn’t return to the unit.”

Anufrieva’s brother said that soldiers who tried to retreat during assaults were shot by their own mortars (Bereg could not independently confirm this claim). “No one needs us here,” she recalled him saying.

While fighting on the Avdiivka front, Bykov broke his foot, shattered his right hand (and then continued to fight while wearing a cast), and suffered shrapnel wounds to his chest, thigh, elbow, and calf. “His legs were like colanders from the shrapnel,” Anufrieva said.

After the shrapnel wound to his chest, Bykov got his first tattoo so he “could always be identified.” In February, his toes turned black from frostbite but he still wasn’t hospitalized. “There wasn’t really any treatment [in the unit]. They just applied ointment and bandaged it,” he told his sister.

Bykov got shoes a size larger so he could walk and the command staff continued to send him on extraction missions. “A drone hit one of his fellow soldiers in the stomach and his intestines spilled out,” Anufrieva recounted. “And as soon as Maxim got him out, they gave my brother a beating and sent him back [to the front line].”

Bykov was finally hospitalized in March after he lost consciousness at the brigade’s base. He called Anufrieva and said, “Send [the commanders] 50,000 rubles [$570] so they’ll put me in the hospital. Otherwise, they won’t do it.”

‘Don’t complain — otherwise, they’ll zero me out’

According to the rank-and-file’s relatives, the 1st Slavyansk Brigade’s commanders extorted money for everything. Tatyana Anufrieva said her brother’s commander demanded “tens of thousands” of rubles for a “break,” 200,000 rubles (about $2,275) to skip a combat mission, and 500,000 rubles (almost $5,700) to sit out combat missions for a couple of months. (For comparison, the minimum monthly salary for a Russian soldier fighting in Ukraine is 210,000 rubles, or about $2,400.) The commanders also took a significant cut of the compensation payments made to wounded servicemen.

At the hospital in Donetsk, Maxim Bykov was diagnosed with double pneumonia, sepsis, kidney inflammation, and heart problems. The doctors also suggested amputating his blackened toes to prevent gangrene. When they removed his cast, they discovered that the bones in his hand weren’t set properly. “His little finger was embedded in his palm and the rest of his fingers were sticking out in different directions,” Anufrieva said. The doctors told her that without extensive treatment at a well-equipped hospital, “your brother won’t survive more than a year.”

Anufrieva regrets that she didn’t push for her brother to be hospitalized earlier, but Bykov had begged her not to interfere. “The soldiers were all afraid to open their mouths,” she explained. “After the wives [of the other recruits] and I wrote letters to the prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Committee and made a complaint to the president, he called me in hysterics [and said], ‘The commander hit me so hard with a machine gun that my ear turned blue. Don’t write anything else! Don’t complain about anything — otherwise, they’ll zero me out.” (Other soldiers from the brigade have said they received similar threats.)

The brigade’s command staff went to great lengths to make sure that information about the conditions in the unit didn’t get out. Soldiers who complained or refused to take part in combat missions were locked in basements, shackled to handrails, or taped to bunk beds. Bykov once spent an entire night taped to a bunk without food or water. “To keep them from making a fuss or getting upset, they’d throw them in pits without sustenance and keep them there for up to a week. They only survived because their fellow soldiers fed them secretly,” Anufrieva said.

According to Anufrieva, one of the senior officers threatened to kill her brother right before a combat mission, saying, “If you survive the front line this time, I’ll zero you out.”

Bykov survived and ended up in the hospital — only to have two unidentified men whisk him away in a civilian car on June 6. He made one last call to his mother and said, “They’ve come for me — they’re taking me back to the unit.” Then Anufrieva received a message that said, “Sister, transfer 15,000 rubles, it’s urgent!” She immediately knew it wasn’t from her brother. “He never called me sister, only ‘Nanny,’” she explained. “I’m five years older than him — I raised him.”

No one has heard from Maxim Bykov since (his phone number has been disconnected). The brigade told Anufrieva that her brother “left the unit without permission,” but she doesn’t believe them.

* * *

Of the 252 soldiers from Maxim Bykov’s battalion, only four are definitely alive — the rest of the draftees are listed as missing or dead. Around 500 of these soldiers’ relatives keep in touch through a group chat on WhatsApp, one of many such groups on social networks. “You might go crazy otherwise. Because the commanders don’t pick up the phone or answer messages, and they change their numbers,” Anufrieva said.

“A sixth group has already gone on a combat mission since my brother went missing. And no one returns!” complained Natalya. “All I hear is: ‘Poor guy, he ended up in the deadliest unit.’” Igor Anistarenko’s stepmother, Svetlana, agreed: “It seems to me that almost the entire [troop] rotation has died.”

Larisa Mamaeva, whose brother disappeared two months ago, said that the soldiers refer to the unit’s mortality rate as “the algorithm.” “No one serves there for more than six months: If you make it through one combat mission, you won’t make it through the next one,” she said.

Two of Bereg’s sources even tried to travel to the front line themselves to search for their missing brothers, but they soon realized this wasn’t possible. “I asked humanitarian workers to take me with them, just to leave me there so I can scour every centimeter. Of course, they quickly told me I was “insane” and that I wouldn’t be allowed to go there,” Natalya recalled. “The uncertainty kills [you]. Every morning his son cries [and says,] ‘Mommy, has daddy called?’”

Vinera, who is searching for her brother Marcel, said she’s also prepared to go to the front herself. “I’d like at least to bring his bones home, so my mom can go to the cemetery and tend his grave,” she said. “We’re searching for him — dead or alive — and we can’t find him.”

The Russian Defense Ministry did not reply to Bereg’s questions about the 1st Slavyansk Brigade.

Reporting by Lilia Yapparova for Bereg

Abridged translation by Eilish Hart