The brutal life at the front: Russian soldiers provide terrifying insight into other Mallorca regatta participants being attacked by killer whales

How terrible war is – only those who suffer from the conditions, the attacks, the fighting can understand. The casualties of the war in Ukraine weigh heavily.

When Ukrainian soldiers report on their operations at the front, they often provide frightening insights. They report shell hits, mortar attacks, wounded and dead.

From the Russian side, on the other hand, one hears and reads almost nothing about the situation.

But besides the many differences that separate Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, there is a very serious contrast: The Ukrainians are valued by their country, their government – the Russians, on the other hand, are seen as a means to an end.

Two conversations that the American news channel CNN was able to have with Russian citizens have now proven this.

They are stories representative of the miserable and exhausting loss of life in the Russian trenches. Stories that show how little a soldier’s life is worth – at least to the Russian leadership. Than: Most of the dead were prisoners who had been promised parole if they joined the so-called Sturm Z battalions of the Russian Defense Ministry.

Freedom or death – a deal that was doomed from the start.

It has happened before that Russian soldiers reported their experiences to Western media. But, as CNN writes, these were POWs. However, CNN managed to speak to people who had not been brokered by Ukrainian authorities.

War in Ukraine: young soldier dies after only three weeks at the front

Why is it important to emphasize this? Simply put, it shows that Russia’s inhumane policies can be proven regardless of Ukraine’s influence.

According to CNN, it spoke to the mother of a 23-year-old prisoner. The young man was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for drug offenses. Until he was hired. He wanted to be free. The promise: if you manage to survive six months, you’re free.

But six months turned into three sad weeks.

According to CNN, the mother provided extensive video footage, documents and chat messages to confirm her son Andrei’s story. CNN changed the name for security reasons.

The mother, whom CNN calls her Yulia, showed the broadcaster a video of her son at a training ground in occupied Ukraine, where he quickly learned attack tactics. It shows his badly shaved face: burned by the sun, under a large camouflage helmet, in the back seat of an army truck.

“Victory Day” becomes a nightmare

Then, on May 8, Andrei informed his mother that his unit had been sent to the front lines in one of the most contested parts of the eastern battlefield. They were to begin at dawn on May 9 – attacking the Ukrainian positions. On May 9, Putin celebrated the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany in Moscow.

“We had a fight,” quoted CNN’s mother Yulia. With tears she reported:

Then he disappeared forever.

No corpse, no goodbye. Just go away.

It wasn’t until weeks later that Yulia learned from the relatives of the other prisoners that up to 60 soldiers had been killed in this particular attack – this number cannot be confirmed.

“The worst thing was that I was afraid he would kill someone,” Yulia is said to have said. “As ridiculous as it sounds, I was afraid he would go through everything and come back to me as a murderer.”

Another interview from CNN shows how barbaric their own soldiers are treated.

Russian soldier wounded several times

Ex-soldier Sergei – who also changed his name on CNN – reported that the food was mainly canned meat with instant noodles, but they had to walk three to four kilometers for water. That sometimes they had to melt snow to be able to drink anything at all. “Sometimes we have not eaten or drunk anything for days,” he tells the news channel.

He tells of executions that also took place before his eyes, he tells of looting on his own side. After all, the soldiers lacked everything.

Today Sergei lives in Russia again and tries to keep himself and his family afloat with two jobs. He is still awaiting compensation from the military for his numerous injuries.

He served eight months at the front, he tells CNN. Eight months – nine concussions, two gunshot wounds. In the winter he was shot in the leg. He was treated for ten days. And then: back to the front.

He was shot again – this time in the shoulder, and he had to be hospitalized. The stay there lasted a full two months before he was sent back to hell. Due to a lack of staff, he tells CNN. There he saw that even soldiers with amputated limbs had to continue working for the army. They brought nothing on the direct line of contact. But as radio operators, they could still be of use to the fighters.

They no longer had body armor. According to Sergei, they were thrown away because they offered little protection. “They don’t help against grenades because they’re theirs [ukrainische] Artillery strikes with high accuracy,” he told CNN. “Our artillery can fire three or four times and, God willing, something will explode. It’s warped and usually hits us first.”

Sergej reports a strikingly high number of victims. 600 prisoners were recruited from his unit alone in October – only 170 survived and all but two were wounded. “Everyone got hurt two, three, sometimes four times,” he said in an interview with CNN.

He then tells how he saw colleagues ripped to pieces by shell hits – and how he was surprised to have survived. One attack was particularly persistent. Not only because Sergej was injured again. He shows how unscrupulously the lives of their own men were played with. Sergei says:

This deployment was his last in the immediate front line. A grenade landed next to him – concussion number nine. For five hours he saw nothing, only a white veil before his eyes.

Then he found doctors who gave him a job as a hospital nurse after his short treatment: Transport of corpses, checking of corpses for identification papers, cleaning.

Until the last month of his contract expired.