Fire on its own

For 10 months of full -scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military died not only in battles with Ukrainians, but also from Friendly Fire - “Fire in its own”. Such losses suffer from all the kinds of troops of the Russian army in Ukraine, experts of the Royal United Institute of Defense Studies of Great Britain (RUSI) reported . The fact that the Russians are dying from “friendly fire” was reported not only by the General Staff of the Armed Forces, but also recognized officials of the Armed Forces of the DPR, fighting on the side of Russia. About how “their own shot their own,” was transferred to relatives from the front and mobilized Russians. The Russian army carries part of the losses outside the war zone.

The Russian Ministry of Defense hides data on such losses. The agency ceased to publish statistics about those who died from all reasons (illness, murder, suicide, accidents, accidents, including exercises, combat losses) of military personnel since 2010. The latest official data on the number of deaths in the Russian army are known in 2015: then the statistics of deaths surfaced in the documents of state procurement for military insurance. They show that in the Russian army this happened more often than, for example, in the American and British. In terms of the number of armed forces of countries at that time, 8 people per 10 thousand troops died in the Russian army, and 4 people in the UK Armed Forces, 6 in the US Army (the losses on the losses are published by the US Department of Defense and Great Britain , and the number of troops of the countries are contained in the collection of The Military Balance 2016) .

“Important stories” studied the sentences of the garrison military vessels to the Russian military, who were convicted in 2022 for the murder of colleagues. These cases, which occurred in military units or temporary deployment points, show how the negligence of the command, Russian troops exhaust the low quality of military training before sending to the front.

Inquired and drunkenness

“That's how it all happens, the young guys die in Ukraine, but everything continues ... Let the earth be fluff,” a resident of Kovrov from the Vladimir region from the Brother on her VKontakte page signed ( the author’s spelling and punctuation are preserved. - approx. Ed. ). Local media reported that the 25-year-old Roman Moiseev died on March 23 in Ukraine. In fact, Moiseev never reached the front. In February 2022, as part of the 423rd motorized rifle regiment, Moiseev was transferred to the village of Kozinka of the border Belgorod region “to perform special combat tasks”, where the colleague shot him: he took off his charged machine gun, touched the trigger, and the bullet hit Moiseev.

From the wound, Roman died in the hospital. For this shot, the careless colleague of Moiseev was convicted of two years in prison. The court admitted that the military violated the rules for handling weapons: he did not defuse the machine at the end of duty, and when removing the machine gun from the shoulder, he directed it towards the person.

Support “important stories” your donation will help us tell the truth about the Russian army to support

“Violation of the rules for handling weapons, which entailed by negligence of the death of a person” (Article 349, part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) is one of the most common articles by which the Russian military is judged by the murders of colleagues. About the same plot was repeated in the sentences studied by the “important stories”: the soldier forgot to put the weapon on the fuse and shot a colleague by accident or for the sake of a joke, the result - the murder by negligence.

However, murders in the army occur not only because of indecration, but also because of drunkenness. For example, on August 8, 2022, the Crimean garrison military court sentenced the contractor Sergei Samsonov. At the point of temporary deployment of his military unit, Samsonov, when disassembled by Makarov’s pistol, “unintentionally” shot a colleague. The court considered the aggravating circumstance that Samsonov committed a crime, being drunk: the state of intoxication influenced his behavior when handling weapons.

“The use of alcohol military personnel during service is the main cause of incidents in the Armed Forces, such as injuries, conflicts, murders, at least in peacetime in the territory outside the war zone,” said military experts from Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT). The number of such losses is also affected by the low level of competencies of the command staff and the low level of professional training of Russian military personnel, analysts say.

“Another reason is the lack of junior command staff. There are no sergeants in the troops who would follow the discipline and help in resolving conflicts, there are no officers who would delve into, who serves in their unit, what kind of person it is, ”they add.

It affects such losses and a low level of discipline in the Russian troops, CIT experts note. According to them, the problem with the lack of discipline in the army has now exacerbated, and the situation will become worse: “They do not work with [personnel] military personnel, and do not work doubly with mobilized ones. For each military unit, the arrival of mobilized training is undesirable activity, they were driven into the barracks, and they are simply waiting for sending to the front without getting to the military team. ”

Photo: AFP / Scanpix / Leta

Inability to use technique

“Violation of the rules of driving or exploitation of military vehicles, which entailed by negligence of the death of a person” (Article 350, part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) is another article, which often judges the Russian military for the death of colleagues.

So, in April 2022, the contractor Dmitry Golubev was convicted , whose fault a few months before Russia's invasion of Ukraine was killed at the military training ground. In September 2021, a tank company in which Golubev served was on exercises. Golubev was appointed commander of the crew, with him in the tank was a driver-driver. As follows from the sentence, before the start of the movement, Golubev had to stall the tank tank and turn off the fire control system, but “he did not know where the stopper was located” and did not do it. During the movement, the driver's head crushed the unfinished tank tank. For the murder of a colleague, by negligence, Golubev received a suspended sentence.

Another Russian military, Ramis Khasanov, was sentenced in February 2022 under the same article to a real term in the colony. Together with his colleagues, he unloaded military equipment at the railway station and crushed his colleague to death bumper. The court came to the conclusion that Khasanov should not were driving: his position did not provide for admission to the driving of the Urals, and he did not have the skills of driving such equipment.

The negligence of the commanders

The reason for the death of the Russian military is the negligence of the bosses. Contractor Alexander Bessolnov served in military unit No. 31134, where the 15th motorized rifle regiment of the Taman division, which is now involved in the invasion of Ukraine, is deployed. Bessolnov served as the head of the control and technical point, that is, he was supposed to monitor the serviceability of combat vehicles in the unit. In February 2022, he was convicted that he did not check the technical condition of one of the Urals before going to the route: he limited himself to a visual inspection of the car and therefore did not notice that the brakes did not work for it. Because of this, his colleague Mikhail Dunaev drove to the faulty Urals, could not slow down and ran into an ordinary Evseev, who served in a daily outfit on the checkpoint and went to open the gate for Dunaev. Evseev died on the same day from injuries.

Bessolny was condemned for negligence, which entailed by negligence the death of a person, and punished with a conditional term. The court found the driver of the Urals, the court found the court guilty of violating the rules for driving a transport vehicle that entailed the death of a person by negligence, and sentenced to a conditional time.

According to CIT analysts, the incidents related to military equipment are not in the technique itself, but in its state and the quality of its maintenance, and the situation with this in wartime is much worse than in a peaceful one. “Riding by car with broken brakes is a violation of safety precautions. But at the front, the military traffic inspectorate does not control this, ”say CIT analysts. - War - the peak of negligence. If in peacetime everyone doesn’t care, and this is not being monitored not to avoid accidents and deaths, but to avoid getting into reports where they will write that someone died. Only for this, safety and maintenance requirements were observed. Now everyone is violated simply because “war, not to security”. ”

Even in peacetime, it happens that a violation of safety commanders leads to the death of several people at once. One of these incidents occurred in the Trans -Baikal Territory back in 2020, but the relatives of the victims still continue to fight in court in order for the guilty to tighten the sentence. On the territory of the military unit, two calls were killed from the explosion of ammunition-Zaur Kurbanaliev from Dagestan and Batyr Dzagashta from Kabardino-Balkaria, four more were injured.

The commander of the military unit Alexander Shatrov and the head of the storage department Alexander Malyshev was found guilty. Shatrov gave the order to Malyshev along with the draftees to burn the surplus of gunpowder with the expired service life. Malyshev left some conscripts at the place of burning gunpowder who did not have the skills of destroying ammunition, and according to the rules they could not be allowed to work with increased danger. As a result, an explosion occurred, and two conscripts died from the burns received in the hospital. For “negligence, which entailed by negligence, the death of two or more persons” (Article 293, part 3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) Shatrov and Malyshev was sentenced to conditional terms.

Photo: AP / Scanpix / Leta

Household conflicts

The Russian military kill each other not only “by negligence”, but also intentionally. The contractor of Stanislav Bolkunov six months before the invasion of the Russian army to Ukraine was sent to the colony for 10 years for a shot in a colleague in a military unit in the annexed Crimea. Explaining the motives of the murder, Bolkunov said in the court that his colleague “allowed him to be an insulting statement about his [Bolkunov] on vacation”, and his colleagues who testified in court, Bolkunov, told that he shot because they “surrendered his nerves”, “there were many tasks from the commander and he had not found tension and did not find any other way out.

Household conflicts are the reason for the murder of their own. So, the soldier Klimov rented an apartment with his colleague. One day they had a conflict regarding the payment of the apartment, and Klimov inflicted four blows with a knife to the colleague. The next day, leaving the corpse of a colleague in the apartment, Klimov went to the service. When he returned home, other colleagues knocked on the apartment, who was looking for a neighbor Klimov, who did not appear in the service that day. “Frightened, [Klimov] wrapped his body into the carpet, dragged him to the window and put a dryer with things on it,” and then let his colleagues into the apartment. One of them looked into the carpet and found a corpse. For the murder of a colleague, Klimov was sentenced to 9 years in a maximum security colony.

Another military man, Ismail Dzangiev, is accused of attempting to kill a colleague. According to the Ukrainian publication Rettar, Sergeant Dzangiev attacked a colleague in Mariupol on March 26. After the battle, he was looking for his younger brother, who was also a military man. Brother Larionov’s commander could not answer Dzangiev, where he was, and Dzangiev shot Larionov in the face.

Suicide

In the sentences of the Russian military, the suicides of colleagues also appear. In March 2022, the Military Court found Ainur Damendarov from Bashkortostan guilty under an article on violation of the authorized rules of service that entailed grave consequences (Article 344, part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Damendarov was appointed duty officer on the military unit management company and, in violation of the rules, let the ordinary weapon in the room, who told him that the command instructed him to stick shortcuts with numbers on knives. Damendarov did not check this information, and leaving the ordinary in the room of storage of weapons, he went to bed. While Damendarov was asleep, the ordinary took the machine gun and ammunition in the arms room and "" fired a single shot to his head, as a result of which he received a gunshot wound incompatible with life, from which he later died. " The court admitted that Damendarov violated the authorized rules for serving when he let the ordinary weapons into the room and left the ammunition boxes unattended, “facilitating” this plan for the commission of suicide, and sentenced to a conditional term.

Friendly fire

Incidents with the murders of colleagues who occurred on the battlefield in Ukraine do not fall into the sentences of military garrison ships. “During the war, many cases of friendly fire arise in the literal sense of the word,” says military expert Jan Matveev. -Not because of a violation of the rules for handling weapons or conflicts, but because of poor communication. Most often, this is the fire of artillery in its own and inaccurate attacks from the air - because it is difficult to adjust them in real time. First of all, due to the long chain of command. It is now impossible to evaluate the numerically such losses, since the Russian side hides this data. Yes, and Ukrainian too. But judging by the open information from the so-called Z-channels and “military commissions”, such situations with friendly fire occur-more than once they wrote about the problems of using artillery to support the attack. When the arrivals covered their own, instead of providing a fire shaft in front of the advancing. ”

The assessment of the share of loss from fire in its Russian army sounded only once. The Institute for the Study of the War (ISW) in one of his reports referred to the words of the commander of the Vostok battalion, the DPR Alexander Khodakovsky, who stated on November 5 that friendly fire could cause 60 % of the total losses of the Russian army, but ISW experts called this assessment of the high.

Military experts interviewed by “important stories” say that it is impossible to assess the share of losses at the hands of colleagues in the total number of losses of the Russian army during the war, but some of them are sure that it exceeds the global conditional norm and is growing in comparison with the shares of such losses in the first months of the war.

“At the very beginning of a full -scale invasion of victims from friendly fire in the Russian army, there were fewer than [appear] now,” says Ukrainian military expert Alexander Kovalenko. “At the very beginning, one could talk about the average global value [such losses], but today it is higher.”

In recent months, two factors influence the increase in such losses of the Russian army, Kovalenko says: “The first is the quality of troops and communication between the advanced units and the rear. In the process of Russian offensive in February and March, the Directorate of Troops was carried out at a more or less acceptable level. But today, the effectiveness of this system is significantly undermined due to the destruction of a large number of [Russian] command posts and control points. Now the Russian command is forced to place the administration of troops at a distance of 30 kilometers from the contact line - outside the affected area of ​​at least artillery, which is used by the Armed Forces, in particular high -precision long -range artillery. And from this the administration of the troops suffers, the consistency between them is violated, which is why the probability of the use of friendly fire increases. ”

Subscribe to the newsletter of “important stories”, find out the first about new stories

Analysts of Conflict Intelligence Team also speak of the disadvantages of communication systems in the Russian troops as a reason for losses from “friendly fire”. “We can look at the previous conflicts in which the Soviet, Russian army - Afghanistan, two Chechen wars, invasion of Georgia - there was a rather regular fire in its combat atmosphere,” said CIT analysts. - And the reasons were related to the shortcomings of the connection and control of the troops. If you arrive for you, in a normal situation you report [the command] about this. The Ukrainian military, since everything is good with communication, is probably easier to report that they flew from their own than the Russian military, who may be completely absent. ”

Military expert Jan Matveev also considers poor communication the main reason for the losses of the Russian army from friendly fire. “Two weaknesses of communication in the Russian army are technical backwardness and weak equipment with normal means of communication, as well as the excessive complexity of the decision -making chain. Military bureaucracy, in a word, says the expert. - In the NATO Army, if you greatly simplify, even a sergeant from the battlefield can call a airline or shelling for a specific purpose during the assignment. In the Russian army, the information must go from one officer to another and receive approval from a higher authorities. За это время ситуация на поле боя, естественно, меняется, и удар вполне может прийтись уже по своим позициям».

Низкая обеспеченность российской армии разведывательными БПЛА (беспилотниками) — еще одна причина роста потерь от огня по своим. «В самом начале вторжения Россия была полноценно обеспечена БПЛА разведывательного типа, но по мере их уничтожения стала ощущать серьезный дефицит, — рассказывает Александр Коваленко. — Именно благодаря разведданным осуществляется основная координация и наводка артиллерии российской армии. Отсутствие развединформации и БПЛА значительно снижает эффективность их артиллерийских расчетов и наводит на позиции своих же подразделений, и поэтому количество потерь от дружественного огня сейчас возрастает».

Коваленко говорит, что среди новых потерь российской армии, которые Генштаб ВСУ публикует в ежедневных сводках , каждый день есть те, кто стали жертвами своего же огня.

Editor: Ales Marokhov