Photograph of Russian soldier taped upside down to a tree in the freezing cold proves it - Putin's army is now a penal colony driven forward by terror and kept in line by execution: DAVID PATRIKARAKOS
They've hung him upside down like a slab of meat. Stripped to his underwear. Arms bound tight with tape. Ankles lashed to a tree trunk in the open winter air. The second man, attached to a neighbouring tree, is at least taped upright.A man screams at them in Russian. He stuffs a fistful of snow into one of the men's mouths. Both cringe in terror, whimpering protestations and pleas.This is no medieval dungeon - it's the Russian army in Ukraine in the 21st century.The men's 'crime'? Refusing to walk, yet again, into what they call 'the meat grinder': frontal assaults against dug-in Ukrainian machine guns and drones, where the life expectancy of a recruit is measured in minutes. The punishment was filmed not so much to shame the perpetrators - whose voices were digitally disguised - as to terrorise the rest of the conscripts. This is not merely sadism; there is a method to it.The men are a warning pinned to a tree like a note: advance or hang. This is now the lot of the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.Other videos that have surfaced tell the same story. Men are beaten with rifle butts for retreating, denied food and endlessly threatened with execution. In one case, a deserter is forced to dig his own grave before being 'reprieved' and sent back to the line in what is one of the most cruel forms of psychological torture. In another, a unit commander shoots over the heads of his own men to drive them out of a trench and into oncoming enemy fire.In a further case the warning was even more horrific. In November 2022, Yevgeny Nuzhin, a recruit of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, who had tried to defect after being captured near Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, was returned in a prisoner exchange. This kind of disloyalty could not be allowed to stand.Nuzhin's head was taped to a brick, his arms were bound and he was forced to kneel. Then, on camera, a man in combat gear calmly raised a sledgehammer and smashed it down on his skull. Once. Twice. Until the body went limp. Russia's President Vladimir Putin. He is no president, he's the czar of a nuclear-armed state: unaccountable to his people, insulated from international norms and cocooned by fear and flattery A man is hung upside down on a tree in just his underwear. This is no medieval dungeon - it's the Russian army in Ukraine in the 21st centuryThe footage was circulated by Wagner channels as a warning to those even thinking of running: a barbaric execution, filmed in high definition and shared around the world.In units around Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, soldiers who refused to advance have been chained to poles and radiators, or thrown into open pits in the ground and left for days without food in the snow. Some were kept under the observation of drones - a menacing presence hovering above, just waiting for the soldier to try to flee, at which point he would likely be killed.Others were tied up like livestock and left swaying in view of their comrades as if to say: this is what disobedience gets you. And when fear is not enough, there is the most final of punishments: the bullet.Investigators have now documented scores of Russian officers who have shot their own soldiers in cold blood. Men accused of refusing an order, of hesitating, of speaking back, are taken aside and 'zeroed out' or 'obnuleniye' - a neutral word that masks an egregious crime. Some are killed in front of their platoons to serve as a warning. Others vanish into cellars or the woods, their shallow graves scraped over by frozen soil. This is not an army, it's a penal colony, driven forward by terror and kept in line by execution.But the Kremlin is too shrewd to remain deaf to the accusations that soldiers have made against their superiors. The Chief Military Prosecutor's Office has received more than 12,000 complaints related to various abuses since the 2022 invasion. But due process is an illusion.While the government tolerates grievance, only a handful of cases will ever be investigated, given that reports last year spoke of an unofficial ban on interrogating field commanders. As of October, from the thousands of complaints, only ten criminal cases have been launched, with just five officers convicted of killing subordinates.It's little surprise that Russia is burning through men at a rate unseen in Europe since the Second World War. Entire waves of mobilised reservists and convicts have been thrown into no man's land. A man is tortured by Russian soldiers who shared the footage online. Other videos that have surfaced tell the same story. Men are beaten with rifle butts for retreating, denied food and endlessly threatened with execution A Russian strike in eastern Ukraine earlier this month. The Russian military has always relied on fear. The tradition of 'dedovshchina' - the savage hazing of conscripts - long pre-dates UkraineAs they charge towards Ukrainian lines, their goal is often not even to storm them, initially at least, but to draw fire and therefore reveal enemy positions - to die so that the next wave might advance a few dozen metres. I have heard first hand about these attacks from Ukrainian machine-gunners who told me how you line up the sights, squeeze the trigger, round after round, until the barrel glows and the air shimmers with heat. The first wave falls, and then another comes, and another. When the gun runs dry, you frantically change the box, knowing in those few seconds the figures are still stumbling forward through smoke and snow.'You get tired,' a general in Rubizhne in the Luhansk Oblast region of eastern Ukraine told me. 'They just keep coming. But that's OK. We just keep firing.'This is the logic of Putin's Russia: a state that treats human life as an expendable resource, and fear and coercion as substitutes for morale.Why does Russia torture its own soldiers? Simply because it must. Soldiers who believe their mission is just, and their leadership legitimate, don't need to be hung upside down in the snow. The coffins returning to provincial towns and villages across Russia have stripped away the lies. The promise of quick victory has dissolved into mud and mines, and so the reservoir of willing 'patriotic' volunteers has dried up.Even after a formal mobilisation of 300,000 men, and the frantic signing-up of hundreds of thousands more with cash bounties and inflated salaries, the Kremlin is exhausting manpower at a rate no normal society could sustain.Western intelligence estimates put Russia's total casualties at close to a million, with more than 200,000 dead. At times the army has been losing more than a thousand men a day, killed or wounded.Battalions are chewed up to gain a few hundred metres; fresh conscripts are thrown forward to die where the last wave fell. In some sectors, analysts calculate, dozens of Russian soldiers have been maimed or killed for every single square mile of ground taken.The pitiful rate at which the Russian army has crawled forward was laid bare this week by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.Analysis by the Washington-based think-tank shows Russia has advanced between 15 and 70 metres per day since early 2024. For comparison, in 1916 British and French soldiers gained an average of 80 metres a day at the Somme. Yet in its assault on the Donbas city of Chasiv Yar, Putin's forces have barely managed 15 metres a day - slower than a snail. Russian soldiers in the Rostov region of Russia. It's little surprise that Russia is burning through men at a rate unseen in Europe since the Second World War. Entire waves of mobilised reservists and convicts have been thrown into no man's land Russian tanks trundle through Red Square to mark VE Day. Western intelligence estimates put Russia's total casualties at close to a million, with more than 200,000 deadThe senselessness of all this death for such little reward carries on without end for one reason: the man at the top.Vladimir Putin is no president, he's the czar of a nuclear-armed state: unaccountable to his people, insulated from international norms and cocooned by fear and flattery.He has no parliament that can impeach him, no press that can challenge him, no electorate that can remove him. When he needs more men, he takes them. When they resist, his commanders break them.The Russian military has always relied on fear. The tradition of 'dedovshchina' - the savage hazing of conscripts - long pre-dates Ukraine.It's a system based on violence and humiliation: the suicides are priced in. In one widely documented case from a Russian garrison in Siberia, a young conscript was stripped to his underwear, beaten with belts and rifle slings, and forced to stand at attention for hours in the snow while senior soldiers poured cold water over him.In another, a recruit was made to crawl the length of a corridor while being kicked and stamped on, ordered to kiss his comrade's boots, then locked in a cupboard overnight. These rituals are an established part of a system in which terror, not training, is the glue that holds units together.The state tolerates it because it has kept the machine running.And the message is the same as it was for centuries in Russia, from Ivan the Terrible's serfs to Putin's conscripts: your body belongs to the state. Putin with the head of the Russian army Valery Gerasimov David Patrikarakos writes: The message is the same as it was for centuries in Russia, from Ivan the Terrible's serfs to Putin's conscripts: your body belongs to the stateThis is why the Kremlin can feed men into the furnace with such indifference. Why it can mobilise hundreds of thousands, send them forward with minimal training, minimal protection, minimal chance of survival, and why, when one wave is cut down, another is assembled behind it. War has merely stripped away the military's last restraints: now the cruelty doesn't stop with the men in uniform - it reaches into their homes, and to their families.In Russia's far eastern provinces, military police and masked enforcers have begun hunting the families of deserters like animals. Sons who slipped away from the front find their mothers seized, beaten and shocked with electric batons. Fathers are dragged off, hooded and told that they will suffer, and their boys will be branded traitors unless the missing men return to the line.The state even takes family members hostage to feed its war.The Ukrainian soldiers I meet understand this better than most Western politicians.They know that they are not fighting units so much as an entire state culture. A culture that fetishises death and enforces obedience with the lash. In Russia dissent is blasphemy, the individual is nothing and the state everything.Ukrainians have seen, as I have, the mass graves in liberated towns - the bodies piled high with bullet holes and torture marks. They have listened to intercepted calls in which Russian soldiers describe torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war and raping Ukrainian women.For all the talk of negotiations and fatigue and 'realism', the basic truth remains unchanged.Ukraine is fighting a state that has invaded Georgia, Crimea, Syria and eastern Ukraine. Each time it has pushed further because the response is so weak.We know what happens when these kinds of fetid regimes are appeased: they don't stop, they advance. The choice, then, is not between war and peace. We are already at war with Russia - and have been for years, whether we accept or like this fact, it remains the case.The choice facing us is between stopping a system of the most horrific brutality in Ukraine now, or facing it later, in much more powerful and widespread form.We have yet to wholly decide. But, believe me, the men hanging upside down in the snow already know the answer and, by now, so should we.
