Suicide has become increasingly common among Russian soldiers deployed to the frontlines. This is particularly common among those wounded in the infamous ‘meat wave attacks,’ in which the forlorn hope assault leaves numerous troops with little to no hope for evacuation and treatment by their own side, be it due to the callousness of their commanders or the inability of the notoriously undersupplied and overstrained medical corps.
As Kyiv Post reports, for many wounded, this leads to an overwhelming sense of despair, hopelessness and, ultimately, the sense that the only way out is to take oneself out. The situation is not helped by the abusive behavior of the commanders.
The “I Want to Live” project, a state Ukrainian initiative that launched a hotline in September 2022 in order to facilitate the surrender of Russian soldiers and their safe passage across combat lines in exchange for humane treatment in accordance with international treaties, said in a recent statement:
“[Russian soldiers] go on every assault as if it were their last, because they know that no one will come for the wounded, no one will pull them out, no one will help. Instead of radios and proper first aid kits, they carry instructions in their pockets on how to kill themselves with a grenade, pre-issued by bloated major political officers.”
In other cases, some of which have been recorded, Russian servicemen are seen ‘euthanizing’ their own brothers in arms.
Perhaps most sadly, many of the Russian soldiers may have had a chance at survival and eventually returning to their families if they contacted “I Want to Live” before turning their weapons on themselves, and not only the wounded ones.
But with their minds imbued with Kremlin atrocity propaganda, many Russian soldiers appear to believe that if captured by the Ukrainian forces, they will be subjected to torture, abuse, or some other unspecified fate worse than death. Yet, it is Russia that is still widely reported to subject Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories and captured Ukrainian soldiers to quite similar mistreatment.
“Some are deliberately driven to such a step by bullying, threats, and a sense of total hopelessness. Others shorten their lives, abandoned on the battlefield,” a military intelligence source told Kyiv Post on condition of anonymity.
According to the source, Ukrainian intelligence indicates that there has been a wave of suicides among the Russian troops, with the trend on the increase.
Russia’s lackadaisical treatment of human life, however, impacts its military’s ability to carry out military operations on a grand scale, due to the loss of men in senseless ‘meat assaults,’ now compounded by the high rate of self-check-out by the troops.
Contrary to the narrative that the Kremlin propaganda peddles to its population and its troops, Ukraine has a vested interest in keeping the Russian soldiers it captures alive, in order to exchange them for Ukrainian POWs, often held in dismal conditions, at the nearest opportune moment. A point further driven home by the “I Want to Live” project:
“Unlike their commanders, we need them alive because they will be exchanged later, and we will return our people from the Russian GULAG.”
Ukraine can show a recent POW exchange as proof of this, having captured numerous Russian conscripts and members of the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s ‘elite’ TikTok battalion, some of whom have already been exchanged.
“The conscripts from Kursk, who did not listen to their commanders and Kadyrov’s bandits and surrendered instead of committing suicide, are a living example of this.
115 of them have already returned home through exchange rather than lying in the ground,” the project said.
