Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Can a country engaged in a 19-month-long war with a neighbor, force its own hapless soldiers to die like “meat” on the war front?
This is what is happening in a replay of what Communist dictator Josef Stalin did in Russia during the Second World War in the 1940s.
Now, President Vladimir Putin has taken a leaf from Stalin and deployed “punishment battalions” to face Ukrainian bullets, the media reported on Tuesday.
The unfortunate ones include drunk recruits, insubordinate soldiers, and convicts.
They’re among hundreds of military and civilian offenders who’ve been pressed into Russian penal units known as “Storm-Z” squads and sent to the frontlines in Ukraine this year, the media reported.
“Storm fighters, they’re just meat,” said one regular soldier from army unit no. 40318 who was deployed near the fiercely contested city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine in May and June.
He said he’d given medical treatment to a group of six or seven wounded Storm-Z fighters on the battlefield, disobeying an order from a commander – whose name he didn’t know – to leave the men. He said he didn’t know why the commander gave the order, but claimed that it typified how Storm-Z fighters were considered of lesser value than ordinary troops by officers.
“If the commandants catch anyone with the smell of alcohol on their breath, then they immediately send them to the Storm squads.”
Russian state-controlled media reported that Storm-Z squads took part in intense battles and some of their members received medals for bravery, but it has not disclosed how they are formed, or the losses they take.
The penal squads, each about 100-150 strong and embedded within regular army units, have typically been sent to the most exposed parts of the front and often sustain heavy losses.
One fighter, with a conviction for theft who was recruited from prison, said all but 15 of the 120 men in his unit embedded with the 237th regiment were killed or wounded in fighting near Bakhmut in June.
The deployment of such squads marks a departure for Russia in Ukraine: while the Wagner mercenary group – now being disbanded after a June mutiny – sent convicts to fight on the frontline, the Storm-Z units come under the direct command of the defense ministry.
The squads also combine convicts who volunteer to fight in exchange for the promise of a pardon with regular soldiers being punished for disciplinary breaches, the people Reuters interviewed said.
The Storm-Z squads are useful to the Russian defense ministry because they can be deployed as expendable infantry, according to the Conflict Intelligence Team, an independent organization that’s tracking the war. “The Storm fighters are just sent to the most dangerous parts of the front, in defense and in attack,” the group, which was founded in Russia, said.
While the Russian defense ministry has never acknowledged creating Storm-Z units, the first reports of their existence emerged in April when the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think-tank, cited what it said appeared to be a leaked Russian military report on the formation of the squads.
Wagner had about 25,000 fighters engaged in the conflict, its late leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said at the time of his June mutiny.
President Putin made reference to convicts fighting in the regular army on Friday. At a televised meeting with a small group of regular Russian servicemen, he said he was aware that two of their comrades, former prison inmates, had been killed in action. “They gave their lives for the motherland and have fully absolved themselves of their guilt,” said Putin, adding that the convicts’ families would be given help, without elaborating.
There is historical precedent for military offenders being pressed into fighting units; in 1942, when the Red Army was retreating from a Nazi advance, Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered soldiers who panicked or left their posts into “punishment battalions” deployed to the most dangerous parts of the front, according to a decree he signed.
Ukraine’s government has said it also releases some convicts if they agree to fight in the war.
Storm-Z is an unofficial term used by Russian troops, combining a term for assault troops with the letter Z, adopted by the military as a symbol of their invasion of Ukraine.
While convicts form the core of the penal squads, some regular soldiers have been assigned to them as punishment for breaking discipline.
The Geneva Convention, a set of international rules of war, doesn’t cover soldiers being punished by their own side.
One group of about 20 Storm-Z fighters in Zaporizhzhia, who were part of unit number 22179, decided they’d had enough of their treatment, refused an order to go back to the frontline, and recorded a June 28 video complaining about their treatment.
“On the frontline, where we’ve been, we did not get deliveries of ammunition. We did not get water or food. We’re given dreadful orders that are not even worth carrying out…We refuse to continue carrying out combat missions.”