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Russian soldiers who ran out of ammunition say they are being sent to ‘certain death’ in a video shared by a Ukrainian official
Rebecca Cohen – September 21, 2023
- Russian soldiers say they are being sent to “certain death” in a video shared by Ukraine.
- They say Russia asked a group of Russian artillerymen, who ran out of ammo, to fight on the front line.
- They said they fled and left all of their weapons behind because they were not trained as infantry.
A group of Russian artillerymen said they were being forced to move to the front lines after running out of ammunition — despite lacking any training on how to fight at the front, according to a video shared by a Ukrainian official on Wednesday.
Artillerymen typically position themselves away from the front line, where they fire ranged weapons to support troops in front of them. Infantrymen are typically ground forces who engage in close-range combat using different types of weapons.
Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor in Ukraine’s internal affairs ministry, posted a video on X, formerly known as Twitter, in which the group of men claiming to be Russian soldiers say they are “servicemen in regiment number 1442” and are fighting in “the area of Klishchiivka.”
In the video, which includes subtitles written by Gerashchenko, the men say their infantry had been killed in battle, prompting Russia to try and reinforce the front line.
“We ran out of ammunition, so we got reassigned to infantry. We weren’t trained to be infantry. We were trained to be artillerymen. That’s it,” one of the men says in the video.
They said some soldiers were refusing the assignment and fleeing instead.
The men said that Russia was sending them to “certain death” by asking them to leave their positions as artillerymen to fight on the front lines. They added that others are fleeing, and some are “hanging themselves already” to get out of the new assignment.
“We’re not abandoning our duties, and we never have,” one man says in the video. “We’re just being sent to certain death. All of us. The unprepared.”