As Russia tries to grow its army, a mobilized soldier recounts horror of Makiivka attack

On New Year’s Day, when at least four HIMARS rockets hit a school building in Eastern Ukraine housing hundreds of newly drafted Russian soldiers, another group of newly mobilized youths stationed nearby got a call to help with digging. through the ruins and remains.

A Russian soldier told CBC News that he and others in his group were ordered to search for the seriously wounded and the dead, but sometimes only body parts were found.

“There are more than 100 people (dead),” he said in a message to CBC News.

“I can’t even describe to you what I saw.”

The soldier, who CBC News agreed not to name for personal safety, first spoke to the online Russian news site Verstka about what he believes is an attempt by Russia to cover up how many were killed in the attack in Makiivka, Ukraine.

Russian officials said 89 were killed, including the regiment’s deputy commander. Ukrainians say they believe the true number is 400.

“It’s not just war here,” the young man said. “But it’s an information war.”

Recently mobilized

The deadly attack comes as Russia is almost a year into its war in Ukraine and has announced plans to beef up its military by adding hundreds of thousands of troops.

While the timeline for the move is unclear, Russian officials have signaled that the country will soon raise the age limit for conscription. He insisted that Russia would not begin another unpopular mobilization, although Ukrainian officials speculated that an announcement could come at any moment.

The soldier, stationed near Makiivka, sent messages to CBC News for a week and expressed confusion, stress and distrust of his commanders, who he accused of frequent drunkenness.

He said he would often ask soldiers for money, saying it was needed for essential equipment.

The soldier said he had only been in Ukraine for six weeks, and was drafted outside his home in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, which is more than 1,200 kilometers east of Moscow. To help verify his story, he shared a copy of his identity document and a paper draft.

He said he regretted not going straight to the border like hundreds of thousands of other Russians flocking to Georgia, Finland and Kazakhstan in an attempt to escape the draft.

The soldier does not have an international passport and has a wife and daughter at home.

At the beginning of the conversation, the soldier sounded defiant and talked about how he would rather be sent to jail than to the front. But a few days later, his tone was more resigned, and he spoke of possible consequences.

“Many of us don’t want to fight, myself included, but we don’t know what to do,” he wrote.

“There is no way out.”

Cell phone signal

On January 4, when Russian Lt.-General. Sergei Sevryukov announced that 89 soldiers had been killed in a rocket attack, he blamed the soldier for accidentally giving his location by using a mobile phone, which Sevryukov said was forbidden.

The soldier described the allegations as “nonsense,” saying his friends and commanders often used phones with local SIM cards to call home. When they were told not to use it, they knew it was because they didn’t want to take photos or post videos complaining about the situation.

WATCH | Russia blames cellphones for deadly attacks:

In recent months, videos have been posted to social media platforms of newly drafted soldiers showing inadequate equipment and lack of training.

After weeks of controversy over the country’s “partial mobilization” campaign, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced on October 28 that 300,000 had been called up and that mobilization was over.

But there is no official decree, and some say there are reports of men continuing to receive draft papers ordering them to report to the registry office.

“Mobility is still ongoing,” said Boris Bondarev, a former diplomat who left his post at Russia’s UN mission in Geneva last May in protest at what he called Russia’s “aggressive war.”

In an online statement posted after his resignation, Bondarev called the war “not only a crime against the Ukrainian people,” but also “the most serious crime against the Russian people.”

He denied speculation by Ukrainian officials who have stated that they believe the Russian government will start calling people up en masse from mid-January. He said that the government should not announce a new round of mobilization because the defense ministry can only continue to draft people “every day”, especially from The farther away from Russia, the poorer.

“Russia has a big advantage in Ukraine and the West,” Bondarev told the CBC during a zoom interview from Geneva.

“Russian officials don’t count the losses … they don’t think about the casualties.”

The last time Russia’s defense minister publicly acknowledged the number of soldiers killed in Ukraine was early last fall, when he said nearly 6,000 had died.

Ukrainians and Western officials believe this is a dramatic forecast.

Bondarev said the Kremlin believed it could overcome its losses because it had framed the war as an “existential” one. He said his 75-year-old father, who has denied his anti-war stance, strongly supports what Russia calls “special military operations.”

His father went down to the draft office in the fall because he wanted to go to war in Ukraine, Bondarev said, but he was turned down because of his age.

Raising the mandatory age

This week, the chairman of Russia’s parliamentary defense committee said the country could raise the upper age limit for conscription from 27 to 30 ahead of this year’s spring draft. He said there were also plans to raise the lower age limit from 18 to 21, but that change might not happen for another three years.

Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist who is now a fellow at the Berlin-based Robert Bosch Academy, said she believed it would increase pressure on conscripts to sign military contracts and create troops to be sent to Ukraine.

He said that this “hidden mobilization” would be the most likely way for the military to offset its ongoing losses and continue to send men to the front.

Schulmann said he believed the Russian government would do everything to avoid a repeat of the fall when hundreds of thousands of people fled Russia to escape the draft, and there was what he described as a “level of anxiety” across the country.

Back in Eastern Ukraine, a soldier who spoke to CBC News said he and his group are waiting for orders to be sent to the front.

Whenever he hears bombing, he says try to open and hide. She wants to raise her daughter and live a normal life, she says, instead of being “rotten” for reasons that are unclear.

“Now I feel like a living corpse,” he said. “I have no feelings.”