Corrupt Ukrainian Commanders Discard Fellow Soldiers on Corpse-Ridden Fields - PoW

The frontline battlefields are littered with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, and the Kiev regime's military has not done anything to remove the corpses of their deceased troops strewn across the Zaporozhye front, a Ukrainian soldier Roman Kalinichenko, now a Russian POW, told Sputnik.

Roman Kalinichenko surrendered to the Russian forces of Battlegroup Yug on January 6 at the Vremevsky salient in the Zaporozhye area.

"As I walked across the battlefield, I didn't see a single Russian soldier [dead]. [As for] our guys, [there were] plenty of them. They were strewn everywhere," he said.

Kalinichenko spoke about the massive losses that his unit suffered.

"When our guys go out [on a combat mission], ten people [are] left, and only five or six come back," the PoW said.

According to him, the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers lie even in trenches and bunkers.

"I was situated in a lookout with corpses of our [guys]. It's a small trench, no doors, and there were two corpses inside – they were decomposing, no one even removed them, and a third one was thrown on top at random. I didn't step outside because I knew if I did go out, if I raised my head – I would end up lying there with them. You can only go out at night. I ate meals, looking at these corpses, so my psychological state is not so well right now," he explained.

Kalinichenko also mentioned that of over 70 men in his unit on January 1, only 22 remained alive by January 6 when he surrendered.

"For some reason, I haven't seen a single [body of a] Russian soldier [strewn] across the field like they tell us on Ukrainian TV, [claiming] that it's the Russians [whose bodies] are littered about. That's total hogwash, [the frontline] is covered with the corpses of Ukrainians. That's the truth, I actually saw it with my own eyes," the PoW emphasized.

According to him, the Ukrainian military command won't remove the dead bodies because they want to avoid compensating their relatives. As such, they pocket this money earmarked for the deceased troops via corrupt schemes.

Kalinichenko also shared a story about a fellow soldier, who refused to fight and committed suicide, so the unit's command chalked it up to battle losses.

"He was very young – 26 or 27 years old. He shot himself, [he] didn't want to go. Do you think there was a fuss? No, there wasn't... Our 128th [Territorial Defense Brigade] made it appear as though it counted as a combat casualty," he revealed.

Kalinichenko added that when he refused to go on a mission, the commander threatened to shoot him and count it as a combat loss as well.

A Russian fighter with the call sign Khazar, working with Ukrainian POWs, explained to Sputnik that such practices by Ukrainian commanders are in no way surprising.

"Suicide in a unit is always a huge scandal. During peacetime, this would suffice as a reason to immediately dismiss a number of officers, including the commander. Therefore, it's not surprising, then, that they choose to classify any suicide as a combat loss, particularly given the already staggering number of combat losses in the battalion where Roman served," he noted.