Russia’s Investigative Committee says members of the 83 Guards Air Assault Brigade shot themselves, and each other, so they could fraudulently collect more than 200 million rubles ($2.4m) in state payments.
The alleged scam, which involved 35 high-ranking and decorated officers as well as private soldiers, appears to reflect the endemic corruption in the armed forces and the growing reluctance of men to take suicidal risks fighting in Russia’s war on Ukraine. More than 220,000 have already died among a total of a million casualties.
Guard Colonel Artem Gorodilov and Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Frolov, both senior commanders in 83 Air Assault, have been charged with fraud and are reported to have admitted to their part in the scheme.
Frolov was wounded four times and awarded two medals for his service, but investigators now say none of the injuries resulted from combat operations. He reportedly admitted asking colleagues to shoot him in areas of his body that would avoid vital organs.
Gorodilov is a former commander of 234 Airborne Assault Regiment, one of the units responsible for the Bucha massacre in April 2022, when Russian troops tortured, raped, and murdered hundreds of Ukrainian civilians. He has been sanctioned by the US and his representatives refused to comment on the fraud allegations when approached by Kommersant, the government-aligned Russian daily newspaper.
The pair were first apprehended at the end of June 2024 and implicated their fellow servicemen in the alleged fraud. Ukraine’s HUR intelligence service corroborated the story, though it appeared to use the same language as the Kommersant report.
83 Air Assault was active in Chasiv Yar, which Russia struggled to take last year, and redeployed to the Kharkiv region, according to FDD’s Long War Journal.
The “Nikolaev Vanek” Telegram channel wrote at around the same time that many members of 83 Air Assault “can’t fight, there are too many 500s,”, the military code for soldiers refusing to engage in combat.
Russian soldier Oleg Vesnin, from the unit, released a video that month saying he had been “without food and water” for three days and couldn’t take it anymore.
Prior to that, brigade members had been complaining about a “lack of rotations” and reporting “low morale” after being posted to Bakhmut, according to the ISW.
While corruption is endemic in Russia, the reports have to be treated with caution as they rely on Russia’s notoriously shady Investigative Committee, which Vladimir Putin has referred to as a “pivotal component” in his regime, and has praised for “steadfastly upholding the interests of the state.” Details may be unreliable, and ulterior motives are possible. Show trials are common in Russia, and federal investigations are often used to make an example of people deemed disloyal to the regime.
While there is a track record and widespread opposition media reporting of low morale and soldiers refusing to fight in 83 Air Assault, which lends some credibility to the allegations, the regime could well have other motives in publicizing this story. The costs of financial compensation for the wounded are staggering, often inflated by promises made to those signing up. There may also be a desire to minimize public knowledge of casualties in Ukraine. Recent polling shows a huge number of Russians saying they have been personally affected by the war, some 58% in total.
Back in March, lapsha.media, a Russian propaganda organization masquerading as a fact-checking website, claimed that “Ukrainian propagandists and anti-Russian media” were spreading “fakes” about the catastrophic losses suffered by 83 Air Assault.
Reports of self-inflicted injuries may also help the Kremlin cast doubt on the legitimacy of wounded soldiers. Moscow notoriously lowballed its published casualty figures for the war in Ukraine before it stopped publishing them at all.
An investigation based on National Probate Registry data, by Russian opposition outlets Meduza and Mediazona, indicated that Russian casualties hit record highs in 2024, with the deaths of 93,000 men across the year, twice as many as in 2023.
Of course, reports of soldiers injuring themselves to avoid combat are not unprecedented. At least as far back as World War I, there was evidence of soldiers shooting themselves in the foot to avoid being forced to advance toward enemy guns.
There is more than enough evidence that Russian soldiers are forced into suicidal assaults and that some resist their orders. The story of 83 Air Assault Brigade suggests a cocktail of corruption and desperation by men facing danger, deprivation, mutilation, and death. Not all details presented by tightly-controlled Russian information sources may be true, but the themes of an army devoid of discipline and morale, fighting a war of conquest for a sadistic despot and the people propping him up, are very obviously accurate.
Aliide Naylor is the author of ‘The Shadow in the East’ (Bloomsbury, 2020). She lived in Russia for several years and now reports from the Baltic states and Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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