NOVOPETRIVKA, Ukraine – Few jobs today are less enviable than that of a Russian mobilized soldier deployed to Ukraine.
Since Vladimir Putin’s declaration of partial military mobilization on September 21, dozens of videos have emerged showing the dire conditions under which those conscripted for the Russian invasion of Ukraine are being forced into service. Conscripts gave sleeping in the open air poor food and faulty weaponsand their officers deal with Drink rather than offering any sort of training before being sent to the front lines.
Still others, even further down the socio-economic pecking order, have been forced into the service: the men of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, the Russian puppet states in eastern Ukraine, whose male populations were squeezed en masse this summer. Interviews with locals and documents recently recovered by the Military Times from abandoned Russian positions in the former front-line village of Novopetrivka in southern Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region offer a glimpse of daily life.
Located 40 kilometers north of the city of Kherson, Novopetrivka sat at the heart of the Russian defense line on the right bank of the Dnieper River for over six months. After Russian troops took Kherson in early March in the first days of the war, their advance towards the city of Mykolaiv was repelled by Ukrainian defenders. They quickly settled in Novopetrivka.
Military Times visited the village on November 12, just two days after it was liberated by Ukrainian forces. Crew signs were fresh, notably a series of Zs – the symbol of the Russian campaign – spray-painted on tractors and other vehicles.
“[The Russians] came on February 27 or 28,” said Viktor, a 50-year-old villager. “Columns moved through the village day and night when they attacked Mykolaiv. But then our boys beat them there [at Mykolaiv], and they ran back here and entrenched themselves. There was a fierce battle here – a tank was destroyed over there, my house was hit by a shell – but [Ukrainian forces] couldn’t drive them out,” he says.
The story goes on
In those early days, the Russians were interested in winning over the local population. Viktor and others in Novopetrivka describe good treatment and genuine kindness shortly after the occupation. But the mood quickly changed.
“[The Russians] could see that we were not interested in their propaganda,” said Viktor. “They started to lose their temper, especially since they couldn’t hit anymore [Ukrainian forces] on the battlefield. Until the summer, they regularly took people to be tortured – most of them just disappeared,” he said.
There was also resentment between different sections of the Russian and pro-Russian armed forces stationed in Novopetrivka, with the stark differences in living conditions creating tension.
“The Russians [and Donetsk/Luhansk troops] lived in the trenches and carried out the actual fighting,” says Viktor. “But in the village itself, Chechens and Buryats lived in people’s houses and did not fight at all. They just walked around the village robbing as they pleased, threatening anyone who tried to stop them – both locals and Russians. The Russians didn’t like them at all,” he says.
The trenches themselves begin on the northern outskirts of Novopetrivka, an extensive series of positions arranged in two lines. Scattered in the trenches is the standard range of basic supplies: discarded tin cans, dirty clothes and packs of medicines of dubious quality. However, one object gives a more revealing glimpse of living conditions there: a soldier’s half-filled notebook, left in one of the sleeping bunkers.
Much of the notebook’s content is mundane. Many sites list food rations or patrol schedules. However, one contains a full description of the size and layout of the unit located there. “2. Rifle company, 57 people,” reads the opening line, revealing that it was an infantry unit with no armored vehicles, likely drawn from mobilized or volunteer personnel. The next few lines say there are 16 people per sub-unit, 27 of whom are currently resting after duty doing maintenance work like cleaning and repairs. There is also a grenade launcher platoon, five of which are currently on combat posts and nine are doing other tasks.
Other pages of the notebook give further clues to the unit stationed here. A bunch of phone numbers for other men in the unit are listed on a bundle. All start with the Russian country code +7, but what is more interesting in each is the area code: 990. A quick search shows that this area code was assigned by two Russian telecommunications companies as of May 2022 for the occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhye regions. That these soldiers used private cell phones for military communications – and were forced to jot down their comrades’ numbers on paper – is further evidence of these soldiers’ lack of basic equipment.
Finally, the most interesting site yet captures the mood of the soldier who owned it. There is a clumsy poem in Russian lamenting the “civilians on their fancy motorbikes.” [back home]”, those who did not go to war. “Fuck you, I fought hard,” the author repeats several times, also saying that he “didn’t get buckets of undeserved medals.” The text itself contains numerous spelling and grammatical errors that a Ukrainian speaker of Russian might make – strongly suggesting that the author hails from the occupied Luhansk or Donetsk Oblasts in eastern Ukraine. It’s clear he wasn’t particularly happy with the lot he found himself in – and that he had little love for those who are now thriving in peaceful Moscow.
In the end, the sacrifices of the author and his comrades were in vain, as they were forced to abandon their hard-held positions. Viktor, the local, says the retreat came as a surprise to the Russian soldiers as it did to the residents of Novopetrivka.
“They were shocked,” says Viktor when asked how the Russian and LNR/DNR troops in the village reacted to the withdrawal. “They told us: ‘Russia is here forever’ and suddenly it turned out the opposite,” he said. “But then again, they never really knew what they were even doing here. We fight for our country. They just die as slaves for Putin.”