Their digging, which they took turns due to a lack of available shovels, was brought to an abrupt halt in the early hours of the next morning as Ukrainian artillery lit up the sky and shells began raining down on Agafonov and his unit. “A Ukrainian drone first flew over us and then their artillery started pounding us for hours and hours, non-stop,” Agafonov, who survived the shelling, told the Guardian in a telephone interview on Monday. “I saw men disintegrating in front of me, most of our unit is gone, destroyed. It was hell,” he said, adding that his unit’s commanders abandoned them shortly before the shelling began. Agafonov was called up on October 16 along with 570 other conscripts in Voronezh, a city in southwestern Russia, as part of Vladimir Putin’s nationwide mobilization that has seen more than 300,000 men go to fight in a war the Kremlin calls a “special military operation ». After the attacks stopped, Agafonov, with about a dozen other soldiers, retreated from the forest outside the Luhansk town of Makiivka to the nearby Russian-held town of Svatove. In Svatove, Agafonov and his team moved into a deserted building, trying to communicate with other mobilized soldiers who were with him that night. Makiivka According to Agafonov’s estimates, only 130 draftees out of 570 survived the Ukrainian attack, which would make it the deadliest known incident involving conscripts since the mobilization began in late September. “And many survivors are losing their minds after what happened. Nobody wants to go back,” Agafonov said. The incident shows Russia’s willingness to send hundreds of ill-prepared conscripts to the front lines in eastern Ukraine, where some of the fiercest fighting has taken place, in a bid to halt Kiev’s advances. There is growing anger in Russia as more coffins return from Ukraine, bringing home the remains of conscripts. Some of the details about last week’s bombing could not be independently verified. But the Guardian spoke to a second soldier, as well as two family members of surviving soldiers, who gave similar accounts. “We were completely exposed, we had no idea what to do. Hundreds of us died,” said the second soldier, who asked to remain anonymous. “Two weeks of training doesn’t prepare you for this,” he said, referring to the limited military training the conscripts received before being sent to Ukraine. Russia’s Verstka investigative agency, which first reported the incident on Saturday, cited the account of a third soldier, Nikolai Voronin, who similarly described coming under fire from Ukraine in the early hours of November 2. “There were many dead, they were lying everywhere… Their hands and feet were cut off,” Voronin told Verstka. “The shovels we used to dig our trenches were now used to dig dead.” The bombing led to anguish in Voronezh, where a group of wives of the mobilized men recorded an angry video on Saturday addressing the local governor. “On the very first day they put the lottery pickers in the front row. The command left the battlefield and fled,” Inna Voronina, the wife of a conscript whose fate is unknown, said in the video. The mother of another soldier is heard saying: “They are telling us over the phone that our sons are alive and well and even fulfilling their military duty. How the hell are they alive and well when they were all killed there?’ Last Friday, Putin boasted that Russia had mobilized 318,000 people into its armed forces, citing a large number of “volunteers”. He then invoked the popular Russian saying “we do not leave our own behind”, arguing that the phrase was “not empty words”. But the chaotic mobilization campaign and the casualties that have followed since have drawn criticism from even the war’s most enthusiastic supporters. In a scathing statement on Telegram, Anastasia Kashevarova, a well-connected pro-war journalist, condemned Russian commanders on the ground who she said were mobilizing untrained men. “Groups of [mobilised men] they are abandoned without communication, without the necessary weapons, without medicine, without artillery support,” he said. “Zinc coffins are already coming. You told us that there will be training, that they will not be sent to the front line in a week. Did you lie again?’ In a video, purportedly filmed at a training center in Kazan, the capital of Russia’s Tatarstan region, dozens of newly mobilized men can be seen criticizing its military leadership for a lack of wages, water and food. An officer identified as General Kirill Kulakov is seen retreating as the large crowd of angry conscripts shouted abuse at him. Perhaps sensing growing discontent, Putin said on Monday that he planned to “personally discuss with the Russians” the issues surrounding support for the militants. He urged local officials to “pay attention” to the mobilized soldiers and their needs. Despite the seemingly high cost, the mobilization move has so far not led to Russia gaining new ground, according to a recent report by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based thinktank. The report said the Russian military is “wasting the new supply of mobilized personnel for marginal gains” instead of mustering enough troops to ensure success. “Russian forces likely would have been more successful in such offensive operations if they had waited until enough mobilized personnel had arrived to assemble a force large enough to overcome Ukrainian defenses,” the institute said last Thursday. In another sign of poor morale and miscommunication at the front, several pro-Kremlin journalists have published an open letter, reportedly from an elite Russian infantry unit, criticizing the decision-making of its superiors following massive casualties in an “incomprehensible » attack against. the village of Pavlivka. Russian forces launched an offensive in Pavlivka, southwest of Donetsk, on November 2, according to the Ukrainian military and pro-Russian officials. Four days later, the 155th Guards Marine Infantry Brigade reportedly blamed its military leaders for the loss of 300 men in a letter to Oleg Kozhemyako, the commander of their home region in eastern Russia. “We have been thrown into an incomprehensible attack,” several prominent pro-war bloggers said in the letter. While the Guardian was unable to independently verify the contents of the letter, Kozhemyako appeared to admit it was genuine, but said he overstated the true scale of the losses. “We contacted the commanders. Yes, there are casualties, there are heavy battles, but they are far from what is written in this appeal,” he said in a video statement on his Telegram channel. “I am sure that in any case the situation will be analyzed and the competent authorities will give their assessment.”
