26/ Even when the men – both contract soldiers and mobiks – have specialised qualifications, they are being used as basic infantry instead. One of them served in the navy, another was a driver and qualified mechanic, another was a cook.
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Russian soldiers lack ammunition, only ten rounds in reserve trenches
21/ The men also say they lack ammunition for their weapons. They appear to be manning reserve trenches in case of a Ukrainian breakthrough, but they lack the ammunition to do much. "How are they supposed to fight, in fact, if someone breaks through? [With only] Ten rounds?"
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Winter darkness forces mobiks to wait in trenches for shells
20/ They don't have long to do it, as it gets dark by 17:00. In the short days of winter, the mobiks say that they "spend most of their time sitting in damp trenches in pitch darkness." "They sit like rats in the trenches and wait to see if [a shell] comes or not", says a wife.
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Ukrainian soldiers walk 15 km for food
The men say they have to go to the nearest village, 15 km away, to buy food. (This distance suggests they are serving in the sparsely populated region around Svatove in eastern Ukraine.) They most likely have to make the journey on foot.
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Soldier describes food scarcity and rusty water issues
17/ One soldier says: "If [we eat] once a day, that's good. Nothing [of food] comes to us, it's all sold out at some local markets. If something does come, it is still impossible to eat it. You can't drink water [brought to the soldiers] either, it's rusty."
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Soldiers fall ill to pneumonia before evacuation
This has inevitably led to casualties: "Someone there has already caught pneumonia," according to the wife of a soldier. "Before the guy started choking, they took him away."
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Soldiers lack medicines, first-aid kits; only given rifles
13/ The soldiers also lack any medicines or first-aid kits. One soldier says: "They didn’t even give me anything medical. They [only] gave me an automatic rifle. Well, they should give first-aid kits, some kind of painkillers, right? No!
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Soldiers abandoned with no medicine rely on immunity
14/ They just brought us and kicked us out in the field … [to hell with it], that's all. It's just crazy." The men brought their own medicines from home but have used them up, and instead "have no choice but to rely on their own immunity."
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Extreme cold and malnutrition conditions among soldiers (translated)
12/ As a result, says one soldier, "We are freezing, we are sick. We were sleeping on the ground and on the concrete, under the open sky… Our feet get cold, our teeth start to ache, our backs start to ache."
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Soldiers face danger from drones, no sign of commanders
11/ The men cannot even light fires to warm themselves because of the danger of attracting Ukrainian drones and artillery strikes. They say that there is no sign of their commanders, whom they have not seen since they took up their positions.