Four Russian soldiers have exposed the horror and brutality of conditions on their side of the front lines in Ukraine, with two men telling they saw soldiers being executed on the spot for refusing orders.
One man told a documentary team he saw a soldier executed on the order of his commander, who was made a “Hero of Russia” in 2024.
“I see it – just two metres, three metres… click, clack, bang,” he said.
Another soldier, from a different unit, says he saw his commander shoot four men himself.
“I knew them,” he says of the soldiers executed. “I remember one of them screaming ‘Don’t shoot, I’ll do anything!'”
One of them also says he saw 20 bodies of fellow soldiers lying in a pit after being “zeroed” by comrades. The term “zero” is Russian military slang for executing your own.
In the documentary, The Zero Line: Inside Russia’s War, men give detailed accounts about how they were tortured for refusing to take part in assaults they describe as verging on suicide missions. Russian troops call these attacks “meat storms” as waves of men are sent across the front line relentlessly to try and wear down Ukrainian forces.
For the first time, Russian soldiers from the front line say on the record how they witnessed commanders ordering executions of their own men.
One of the men, whose job was to identify and count dead soldiers, provided detailed lists showing that he is the sole survivor from a group of 79 men he was mobilised with. Because he refused to go to the front line, he says he was tortured and urinated on. Others in his unit who refused would be electrocuted, starved and then forced into meat storms unarmed, he says.
The four men, who are on the run, told of the horrors they witnessed at an undisclosed location outside Russia.
Almost all public opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been stamped out in Russia. Official casualty numbers are not released by Moscow, but the UK’s Ministry of Defence says more than 1.2 million Russian troops have been killed or injured since the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022.
The Russian government says its armed forces “operate with utmost restraint, as far as possible under the conditions of a high-intensity conflict, treating their personnel with maximum care”.
“Information regarding alleged violations and crimes is duly investigated,” it added.
“We are unable to independently verify the accuracy or authenticity of the information you have provided,” it said.
The detailed first-hand testimony from all four men also verifies reports of a breakdown of law and order on the Russian front line.
Ilya, the soldier who identified and counted the dead, is one of the men who says he saw comrades being killed by commanders.
Before the war, the 35-year-old taught children with special needs and autism in Kungur, in the Ural Mountains. Then in May 2024, police turned up at his parents’ house and told him he was being called up.
He was mobilised alongside 78 other men, he says, at a recruitment centre in the city of Perm.
“Nearly everyone was drunk,” he says. “Forwards into battle! We’ll get Zelensky and raise our flag!” he recalls them shouting.
“I was watching them and thinking ‘How did I end up here?’ I was so scared.”
Upon arriving in Ukraine, Ilya says most of the men were sent straight to the front line. He says he did not want to shoot or kill anyone, and ended up at a command post.
Conditions were brutal, and he says he witnessed four people being shot at point-blank range by a commander – one in Panteleimonivka, and three in Novoazovsk, both in Russian-occupied Donetsk in eastern Ukraine – because they had fled the front line and refused to return.
“The saddest thing is that I knew them. I remember one of them screaming ‘Don’t shoot, I’ll do anything!’ but he [the commander] zeroed them anyway,” Ilya says.
Zeroing is usually carried out as punishment for refusing orders, and acts as a means of intimidation for others who may be thinking of doing the same, the men told us.
“Your fate depended on your commander. The commander is on the radio: ‘Zero this one, zero that one,'” Ilya says.
Executions of soldiers who refused orders were not confined to Ilya’s unit.
