Russian troops claim commander wants them dead to cover up battle failures

A group of Russian soldiers stationed in Ukraine recently released a video in which they accused their military commander of giving them an assignment in the hopes that it would kill them.

The soldiers alleged the commander’s motivation for wanting them dead was to cover up his past mistakes that resulted in other troops dying.

The soldiers originally posted their video on Telegram, but WarTranslated, an independent media project that translates materials about the Russia-Ukraine war into English, shared the clip on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday.

Newsweek could not independently verify the video and reached out to Russia’s Ministry of Defense via email for comment.

WarTranslated frequently posts videos of Russian soldiers airing their grievances with Russian President Vladimir Putin or his military leaders. Over the weekend, WarTranslated’s X account shared a video that allegedly showed naked Russian soldiers being forced to stay in a pit because they refused to fight.

On Monday, the media project posted a video of a Russian soldier making a personal plea to Putin to reverse an order that would send him back to the Ukraine front lines after he had already completely lost vision in one eye while fighting.

WarTranslated’s Friday post showed troops making a personal appeal to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to grant them time off. One soldier spoke for the group in the video and identified their location as Krynky.

Krynky is a small village in southern Ukraine on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River. The settlement and the surrounding area have been the site of intense fighting in recent weeks, and Kyiv announced earlier this month that its forces had established a beachhead on the bank in what was seen as an important strategic victory against Russian forces.

The video of the soldiers in Krynky began with the speaker saying they have been deployed to the region since July 30 with “no rotation, not a single day off.”

“We were deployed without ammo,” he said, according to WarTranslated’s on-screen captions. “Some didn’t have armor.”

The soldier identified the unit’s commander as Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Petrovich Zladko and gave his call sign as “Zmey.”

“Yesterday, Zmey was forcing our battalion commander to deploy us to the islands,” the speaker said. “At the moment, the islands are being taken by [Ukrainian troops] who can only be beaten out with FAB bombs.”

He added that Zmey wants to send them to the Dnieper islands when instead they “should be withdrawn after four months to rest.”

The soldier continued by accusing the commander of giving false reports about the situation in Krynky, including that Russia’s military had been successful in its operations there.

“He was reporting from day one that everything is really good here. He was saying that we’re intact, but in reality, from three companies, we have 50 people remaining,” the speaker said.

Returning to the topic of being deployed to fight on islands located on the Dnieper, the serviceman said his unit was refusing to go but invited Zmey to escort them there.

“If he wants he can come here, get in the boat as a senior [officer], and we’ll go to the islands,” he said.

The speaker then said that the commander wanted to send them to the islands where they’d meet sure defeat because he had already been responsible for many troop deaths.

“He wants to send 50 of us to be killed to hide his tracks,” the soldier said, per WarTranslated. “This won’t work. Again, we do not abandon our posts. We’re asking for rotation, rotation!”