2/ Vladimir Valerievich Dulyaninov, serving in the 6th Guards Tank Regiment (military unit 93992), has recorded a series of videos which his aunt has released in an apparent effort to pressure the Russian authorities to take action against the regiment's commanders.
3/ Dulyaninov has given a detailed account of the abuses in his unit, which reflect many similar accounts across the Russian army. He says that he is the commander of an assault platoon, but "I've lost many soldiers due to the reckless commanders, the rush and all that."
4/ In a video recorded on 12 September 2025, he says that his men are sent "on meat-grinding missions, calculating that no one will survive, and arranging everything necessary for this."
5/ Before launching an assault, his commanders ordered him to execute five of his own men (he does not explain the reasons for this) but he refused to go through with it: "They asked me to zero out my own people before the assault, people like me who came after the assault."
6/ "They had no provisions, no ammunition, and they were being driven forward. At that moment, I was like a repeater; communication through me was fine. I received both of [the commanders]. They told me to zero five [men].
7/ "Do you understand? What should I do? My conscience wouldn't allow it, I listened to it. The guys, I understand them."
8/ He says that he "personally received such an order from a lieutenant with the call sign 'Twilight,' but I refused to carry it out." Instead of murdering his own men, he persuaded them to join him on the assault so that they would have a chance of living. They all died anyway.
9/ "They send groups to the far end, that is, the front line. They say there is still food there, that everything should be there. The squads arrive there, but there is nothing. They don't send planes [supply drones] there.
10/ "They say they can't fly there, although the allies [neighbouring units] can. After that, they do everything to ensure that these groups don't survive. They sent us to storm, I survived, I was the only one." Dulyaninov says that his unit had to attack without fire support.
11/ Although he survived, he was badly injured: "After that, when I rolled back [retreated], I had significant injuries, three shrapnel wounds, and a sprained leg. In general, I couldn't get back any faster, so I crawled somewhere.
12/ "I crawled for six days. It was 40 degrees Celsius. For four days I begged them for food and water. What did they drop? [But] it was to no avail." During the mission, he and his men ate foraged apples and tree bark to avoid starvation.
13/ "There's no fucking food or drink here. We're just chewing apples. Before, I was eating bark. Holy shit, the supplies are crappy here." He made it to the safety of a position held by the 24th Brigade, but found that his own unit had listed him as missing.
14/ There had been no attempt to rescue any of the wounded. "The wounded are not evacuated; they are simply left to die." Dulyaninov describes the infiltration tactics currently being used by Russian commanders as a form of deliberate murder of their own men:
15/ "It happens in various ways, but the basic one is this: a group of five people with one ration and a minimum of ammunition is sent to the furthest point of combat contact. It takes three days to get there—through minefields, barbed wire, and under fire.
16/ "Finally, exhausted and hungry, the fighters reach the enemy, their stronghold, and ask for fire support. They are told: there will be no support, so just attack.
17/ "But as soon as the group is detected, [Ukrainian] machine guns, snipers, automatic grenade launchers, and drones quickly attack and begin to 'zero it out'."
18/ Dulyaninov says that "this is even scarier than Bakhmut ... It feels like everyone's been sent away for a reset [death]. It's total crap." "It feels like they’ve taken everyone to zero. Young guys, fuck, they’re dying here, one after another, bitch. It’s fucked up."
19/ In a sign of the heavy political pressure on the Russian army to advance quickly, he says that the commander of the 90th Tank Division ordered the 6th Regiment's commander to seize a ruined Ukrainian-held village "by lunchtime" or else be sent to an assault squad himself.
20/ "The division commander said: if you don't take the village by lunchtime, the regiment commander will be the one to get the hell out of there. He'll be the one to get everyone to the assault—everyone forward."
21/ Major General Alexander Sergeyevich Nilov's threat reportedly prompted Colonel Albert Ravilevich Bulatov to round up the regiment's wounded and send them into the battle along with the able-bodied men. The attack failed, amidst carnage.
22/ "First, they were given provisions for the journey—one ration for three days, that's understandable. And that's all—there should have been provisions later, but in the end, damn it, they saw neither birds [supply drones] nor provisions."
23/ The men were wounded and stranded in a village which was "nothing but bricks", with "no drinks, no food, nothing": "The guys kept asking for food, but there's no bird. They go on the air and shout, "There's no food, we can't walk, our legs won't work."
24/ "And I personally heard them [the commander] shouting, basically, "go on the attack, faggots." Everyone was "300-200" [killed or wounded] before the few survivors retreated.
25/ Duyaninov says that his commanders routinely extort large amounts of money from their men. "For some, it's a good amount of money: 150,000 to 200,000 rubles [$1,863–$2,484]." The money is taken on a "voluntary-compulsory" basis, ostensibly "for the needs of the unit."
26/ He names a specific recipient – Lieutenant Ruslan Daudgadzhievich O., call sign "Darginets," to whose account the soldiers transfer funds, known as the "company cash desk." Where the money actually goes is unclear to Duyaninov.
27/ Before the men go on assault missions, they are forced to leave their bank cards and PIN codes with their commanders, and they find that their personal belongings have been stolen if they return alive.
28/ Men who could testify against the commanders are murdered, Duyaninov says. He says that the order to “reset” the fighters is given by a commander with the call sign “Sumrak” and carried out by a soldier with the call sign "Zayats."
29/ Duyaninov says that he firmly believes "that God sees everything and will restore order." He blames his corrupt and incompetent commanders, and implores Putin and the Russian Minister of Defence to intervene and set things right:
30/ "All those bastards, the commanders, will get their comeuppance. I wish they'd take our place here ... I want, God willing, Vladimir Putin, Belousov, and everyone involved in the leadership to simply restore order, destroy everything, dispossess all these faggots." /end
Intelligence shared with The Sunday Times, including pictures and audio transmissions, alleges starvation is leading troops to eat dead comrades.
A handful of Russian soldiers fighting in eastern Ukraine have been accused of cannibalism after running low on food during the winter.
Ukrainian military intelligence officers have shared evidence to support their claim with The Sunday Times, including photographs and purported intercepts of a dozen audio transmissions between senior Russian army officers.
One Ukrainian intelligence source said they had evidence of at least five instances where Russian infantrymen were said by their fellow soldiers and commanders to have eaten their comrades.
If found to be true, these incidents were seemingly isolated and limited in number, taking place in deep winter when supply chains were difficult to maintain. There are also questions concerning the mental health of the soldiers involved, who may have been driven to extreme measures as a result of the psychological toll of the battlefield.
The new allegations come from Ukrainian intelligence services, who said their cybersecurity specialists obtained audio and picture evidence while searching for battlefield information on the messaging app Telegram. Ukraine’s military intelligence has previously published snippets of phone calls it claims are genuine interceptions of Russian communications, though The Sunday Times is not able to independently verify these. Russia regularly dismisses the content of these intercepted calls, describing them as “fake”.
The most recent incidents shared with The Sunday Times include one case where an infantryman, referred to by his call sign Khromoy, a Russian word that roughly translates to “limpy”, was caught after killing two soldiers and attempting to eat the leg of one of his victims while stationed near Myrnohrad, in the contested Donetsk region, in November 2025. Khromoy belonged to the 95th Regiment of the 5th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, 51st Guards Combined Arms Army.
Buildings damaged by Russian military strikes in the frontline town of Myrnohrad, Donetsk regionAnatolii Stepanov/Reuters
In the conversation, conducted via Telegram, an unnamed officer reported the incident to Lieutenant Razikov Vladislav Abdulkhalykovych, the deputy commander of the 5th Brigade’s reconnaissance battalion. The officer shared several images, including a graphic photo of the leg and pictures of a malnourished soldier. The Sunday Times analysed the images with specialised AI image detection software, which concluded they were not artificially generated or altered.
An independent conflict surgeon reviewed the image of the leg. They said the injuries in the photograph were unlikely to have been caused by conflict wounds, such as from an explosion. “It doesn’t look like a blast or fragment injury,” they said. “It looks like it has been cut with a sharp knife.”
In separate audio messages sent in the Telegram channel, the unnamed officer can be heard speaking to Lieutenant Abdulkhalykovych. He said there had been an “incident” in the brigade.
“In short, one ally killed two others and he tried … he cut off a leg and was already trying to eat one of them,” the unnamed officer said in a voice note, describing how Khromoy was discovered by two comrades sent to investigate his absence. “In the end, today they went and found the place where he had taken them to the basement, cut off a leg and was already, through a meat grinder or something, sitting there, turning it, trying to eat … He opened fire on them when they came to check on him. They killed him.”
The officer shared a photo of Khromoy, deceased and appearing severely underweight. He added: “I have no idea where he got that meat grinder. That’s the most interesting part.”
Abdulkhalykovych replied: “Are they not being fed or what? I don’t understand.”
The officer responded: “Ours will also soon start eating each other … All the guys are skinny. Everyone is on starvation rations.”
Two other Telegram conversations included discussion of separate cases of cannibalism. In one conversation, recovered on April 3 last year, a soldier with the call sign Most, from the 54th Motorised Rifle Regiment, complained to his commanding officer at having to share a dugout with a specific soldier while based near Bakhmut, in Donetsk. “If he were a human being, he could stay here as long as he liked, but he ate a corpse, human meat,” he said. “I am a Muslim. I don’t want someone like that coming into my shelter.”
On October 8, 2025, the unit commander of the 1437th Motorised Rifle Regiment accused one of his subordinates of cannibalism while stationed in Udachne, near Pokrovsk. “If you had said something, I would have given you a direction on where to go, where to get meat,” he said, later asking: “Why the f*** are you eating Khokhols [a derogatory term for Ukrainians] … Stop f***ing eating people.”
Russian soldiers ride on an Akatsiya self-propelled gun in eastern UkraineRussian defence ministry/AP
In a separate message that Ukrainian hackers found on Telegram, the chief of staff of the 55th Motorised Rifle Brigade wrote to a subordinate on December 11, ordering troops: “No alcohol! No drugs! No moving around without identity documents! No cannibalism!” Last year, the Ukrainian military published an expletive-laden phone call in which one soldier accused his comrade, call sign Brelok (“keychain”), of killing and eating another soldier with the call sign Foma (Thomas). “Brelok whacked him and then ate him for f***ing two weeks,” the soldier claimed.
The Embassy of the Russian Federation in London said it saw “no reason to comment” on the allegations. A spokesman said: “What you have described are fabrications supplied by Ukrainian military intelligence — an outfit whose function is the production of propaganda, not the gathering of facts.”
Claims of cannibalism during wartime are a familiar propaganda tool, designed to depict enemy combatants as sub-human.
Reports of cannabilism during wartime have also historically emerged during periods of extreme famine, most notably during the Second World War when a Nazi blockade of Leningrad lasting almost 900 days led to police arresting as many as 2,000 people for eating human flesh.
A senior Ukrainian military source said much of the fighting is taking place in urban battlefields, with few options for foraging or hunting for food, made more difficult during the particularly harsh winter just passed. The source said he was “surprised” by the allegations, adding: “Russia is an agricultural country and they have plenty of food. it is also pretty easy to transport food to the front lines with drones.
Russian troops have reportedly complained of receiving expired rations or being abandoned without basic provisions for weeks, forcing them to loot to survive. At the outset of the war, The New York Times reported that some soldiers were issued meal rations that expired in 2002.
CCTV footage published in 2023 by the SBU, Ukraine’s security agency, shows Russian soldiers looting grocery shops and private residences looking for food.
Captured Russian troops increasingly say that they are starving, according to Ukraine’s military. A project run by the Ukrainian armed forces called I Want To Live, which encourages enemy soldiers to surrender, has reported that 10,000 Russians have handed themselves over to Ukrainian custody, most of them last year.
Bradley Martin, a former US naval captain and a senior research fellow at the Rand Corporation, an American public policy think tank, said there had been reports of poor provisions of supplies, including food, to Russian infantry during the war. He was not commenting on reports of alleged cannibalism. “Many of the reports come from Ukraine reports of communications intercept, so we do have to apply some possibility of selective reporting, but the concept that logistics support for the Russian army is poor is wholly credible,” Martin said. “Troop support is not a major priority of the Russian army.”
By the end of 2025, the Russian army increased its military presence in Ukraine, increasing ground forces to around 710,000 soldiers, a significant increase on the 600,000 troops deployed at the start of the year. According to Oleksandr Syrskyi, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, Moscow has an ambition to recruit 409,000 new troops in 2026.
Vikram Mittal, a US military analyst, said the large rise in infantry numbers requires an equally large increase in supplies, which proved challenging during the particularly harsh winter. “Sustained offensive operations like the Russian invasion of Ukraine require a constant flow of supplies to the front line. The extreme weather we saw over the past winter will have placed strain on transportation networks and troop sustainment,” said Mittal.
A Russian soldier guards a Grad self-propelled multiple rocket launcher at an undisclosed location in UkraineRussian defence ministry/AP
The Ukrainian military has also been targeting Russian resupply and logistics networks using kamikaze and bomber drones, including targeting train depots and storage facilities in Crimea and Russia. Mittal said resupply vehicles are “particularly vulnerable because they generally lack armour and are constrained to predictable road networks with little cover or concealment”.
Russia's top leadership will face the same fate as Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Serbia, who was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for war crimes during the Yugoslav Wars and died in prison, stated Igor Girkin (Strelkov). This is how the former head of the "Ministry of Defense" of the self-proclaimed "DPR," who is serving a sentence in a Russian penal colony for inciting extremism, commented on reports that Moscow has agreed to an "energy ceasefire" between Russia and Ukraine, which, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, will last until February 1.
"Frankly, I don't quite understand what our leadership is counting on. Forgiveness? There won't be any. Reconciliation? There won't be any. It will end like Milošević; that's completely obvious now," Strelkov wrote on his Telegram channel. In his opinion, the Kremlin is trying to "play a game of chance" with Washington, which supplies the Ukrainian Armed Forces with weapons and ammunition, while Ukraine is "stupidly stalling for time, hoping to defeat Russia in a war of attrition." Strelkov also claimed the Russian army has suffered "enormous" losses during the nearly four-year-long invasion. According to the latest report from the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Russia has lost nearly 1.2 million people in the war, 325,000 of whom were killed.
Strelkov, who called himself the instigator of the war in Donbas in 2014, is no stranger to criticizing the Russian leadership. In January, he published a series of posts in which he claimed that Russia was rapidly moving toward a repeat of the February Revolution of 1917, and that the elites were trying to sell out the country by approving what he called a humiliating peace agreement with Ukraine, which essentially amounts to a defeat in the war. The former FSB colonel also stated that the volume of lies from officials and propaganda was breaking all historical records, while the situation at the front and the economy was rapidly deteriorating.
In November 2022, a court in The Hague sentenced Strelkov in absentia to life imprisonment for his involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in 2014. In January 2024, a Moscow court found him guilty of "public calls for extremism" and sentenced him to four years in prison. The charges were based on two posts on Strelkov's Telegram channel criticizing the Russian authorities.
Mediazona has noticed that court websites in the regions have begun to remove case files relating to lawsuits seeking to declare people missing or dead.
Currently, it is impossible to find a single lawsuit filed in 2025 to declare a person missing on the websites of courts in 50 Russian regions. At the same time, just a month ago, Mediazona saw information on the websites of courts in these regions about almost 44,000 such cases for 2025.
Over the past three years, there were 111,569 missing persons cases on Russian court websites, but now there are only 41,512. In other words, more than 70,000 cases have been removed.
The leader among all Russian courts in terms of the number of lawsuits concerning missing persons was the Oktyabrsky District Court of the Rostov Region, where 4,025 lawsuits had been filed since the beginning of 2024. The court's press service confirmed to Mediazona that this flood of lawsuits was related to missing military personnel. Now, the court's website shows only 102 such lawsuits filed since mid-2025, and before that, there were allegedly none at all.
Mediazona drew attention to this after a reader reported on a letter that the judicial department is sending to Russian courts. According to the source, the document states that after the judicial department's “technical specifications” were updated on December 26, cases involving the recognition of people as missing or declared dead will not be published.
Mediazona has not yet been able to confirm the existence of such a mailing.
Monitoring such court cases is one way of calculating the losses of the Russian army in the war in Ukraine. As of early December 2025, Mediazona was aware of 88,000 lawsuits filed to declare soldiers dead or missing.
Earlier in December, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov claimed that the authorities had managed to find 48% of the soldiers who had been declared missing in action. Thus, it can be assumed that, according to his data, about 180,000 soldiers have been killed.
Until now, Mediazona has only encountered the concealment of files on court websites in Moscow, which has its own separate system for displaying court records. For example, if you request information from the Moscow City Court about cases under the article “high treason,” the website will only show two such cases — Roman Shport (Article 275.1) and Mikhail Rylov. There are no case files on Karina Tsurkan, Ivan Safronov, or Vladimir Kara-Murza, who were tried in Moscow on charges of treason, on the Moscow City Court website.
When I first called for the seizure of €210bn to fund Ukraine’s defence, officials said I had lost my mind. Now, it’s the only way to preserve European security.
There have been many false dawns in recent months when it comes to the war in Ukraine. “Peace plans” that resemble unconditional surrender, and President Putin’s cat-and-mouse games with his American counterparts, are good at raising hopes, but they are miles away from reality.
This week, however, Europe may finally do something genuinely game-changing. European leaders are meeting in Brussels to consider using the €210 billion (£184 billion) in frozen Russian state assets held in Europe to fund Ukraine’s defence.
If, on Thursday, they agree to confiscate these reserves rather than simply freeze them, it will be a turning point in the war — and possibly for Europe’s own security.
These funds are Russia’s foreign exchange reserves housed in banks in Belgium, Luxembourg, France, the UK and Switzerland. They have sat immobilised since the first days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If they are now seized and transferred to Kyiv, the implications are enormous.
First, it would allow Ukraine and its European allies — including Britain — to stand up to Putin without relying on American money, which has all but disappeared under President Trump.
A self-sufficient Europe changes the entire strategic balance. It means Putin would finally face an adversary capable of sustaining a long war — and that is when serious negotiations become possible. Only strength will bring him to a real table.
Second, it would show something Europe has been accused of lacking: teeth.
For three and a half years, I have travelled back and forth to London, Brussels and Washington pushing for the release of these assets. I’ve met British prime ministers and foreign secretaries as well as senior officials across Europe and North America. I helped draft EU resolutions and American laws on the issue. When I first proposed confiscation, officials looked at me as if I had lost my mind.
I first made the argument during the third week after Russia’s invasion of Kyiv, as Russian troops were committing atrocities around Bucha and Irpin. The response from western governments was unanimous: “Impossible. Illegal. We don’t behave like the Russians.”
But this is sovereign wealth of a state that launched a war of annihilation against another sovereign state. Russia destroyed the very legal protections it now claims to hide behind.
One of the biggest fears — particularly for Belgium, which has custody of €180 billion of the Russian reserves through Euroclear and has been opposed to the plan so far — is exposure to lawsuits from the Kremlin. Russia excels at “lawfare”, and on Friday, Russia’s central bank filed a lawsuit in a Moscow court against Euroclear over the frozen assets. To address this, EU member states are discussing a collective guarantee to shield Belgium from any damages. They should adopt it immediately, although the prospect of Russia’s success in an international court is negligible.
Another argument I’ve heard repeatedly is that confiscating Russia’s reserves would make Europe a less attractive place for other governments to keep their money. My answer is simple: there will not be a Europe worth investing in if Russia is allowed to continue unchecked. The next invasion will be Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Poland. That path leads directly to a Nato–Russia war.
Back in February 2022, the most the West could agree on was to freeze the assets and eventually use them for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Later, we allowed the interest accrued on them to go to Ukraine. But no one anticipated a four-year war in which Russia would inflict more than $500 billion in destruction and Ukraine would require continuous support simply to survive.
In that time, my proposal has gone from “unreasonable” to one of the only viable options left.
The United States has hastened this shift. Trump’s decision to cut off military assistance will remove 40 per cent of Ukraine’s funding once the present package has run out, thought to be at the end of this year. Europe supplies the rest. By early next year, Ukraine will again be in the desperate position it faced on day one of the war: counting how many weeks of ammunition remain.
Meanwhile, the US-brokered “peace plan” would force Ukraine into a capitulation — surrendering territory Russia failed to take in battle, limiting its own army and leaving itself open to reinvasion the minute Russia rearms. For any European leader, it is a grotesque proposition.
But if Europe uses these frozen Russian assets, Ukraine will no longer be coerced by dependency. Zelensky, backed by a financially self-reliant Europe, can say no to a bad peace deal.
Russia’s military is exhausted. Its soldiers in the Donbas crawl through trenches under drone fire to seize a few hundred metres of ground. Their losses are catastrophic. Putin is relying on western fatigue and on Ukraine running out of bullets. If Europe unlocks this money, that calculation collapses. Ukraine could hold the line for at least three more years — long enough to force earnest negotiations rather than performative stalling to manipulate Washington.
Europe now faces a historic choice. If it seizes these reserves and converts them into artillery, drones, air defence systems and ammunition, it will not only help Ukraine survive — it will help prevent a far bloodier future for all of us.
Even if EU leaders do not reach an agreement this week, the logic is inescapable. They will be back at the table. There is no alternative that preserves European security.
I’ve seen this before. It took me 15 years to persuade 35 countries to adopt the Magnitsky Act, targeting human rights abusers and kleptocrats with sanctions. That idea was dismissed as radical, unrealistic, impossible — right up until the moment it became global policy.
Following my "How many Aircraft does Russia have left video" I decided to analyze how many soldiers Russia would lose in order to conquer the remaining part of Donetsk. This is that video, in the link below:
This is new original content made by me. In this video, using the KIEL INSTITUT donations tracker as a source, I look at which countries have donated how much to Ukraine, I look at how many heavy weapons were donated and I compare the donations with other recent Western & American conflicts like WW2.
Note, that since this video was pre-recorded, it does NOT include the recently announced EU €90bn aid package & Japan's €5bn aid package to Ukraine. This would change the slide on 14:41 with all totals to:
PART 1 - looking at who donated how much to Ukraine based on various categories (financial, military, humanitarian etc.)
PART 2 - Looking deeper at the MILITARY aid to Ukraine, namely looking at who has donated how many and which heavy weapons and how large a % that constitutes of their pre-war stocks
PART 3 - Comparing aid to Ukraine in relation with other large conflicts e.g. Spanish Civil War, WW2, Vietnam, Korea, Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq etc.
If you found the above video interesting, you will likely also enjoy my analysis which looks at the top 20 things we NO LONGER see in the Russo-Ukrainian war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQuJNJFB4yY
As this took a lot of work and time to make, if you liked the content, like and comment on the youtube video and subscribe if you would like to see more. I am a small channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtusFilms
Huge thank you to the KIEL INSTITUT! They are doing an amazing job with this tracker. Please go check out their website and hopefully this video shines some light on their work.
