Russian Officers Threaten to Shoot Their Own Troops for Refusing Orders

Russian military officers can be heard threatening Russian troops in Ukraine with a gunshot in an audio recording shared on social media Monday.

The clip was posted on Twitter—which saw its logo rebranded as X on Monday—by WarTranslated, an independent media project that translates materials about the war in Ukraine into English. According to WarTranslated's caption, the incident occurred because the troops were refusing to return to fighting on the front lines in Bakhmut.

Bakhmut was the site of intense fighting for several months before Russian forces claimed to have captured the Ukrainian city in May. However, Ukraine's military has since resumed battling for control of the city with Kyiv launching a counteroffensive against Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces in June.

Per WarTranslated's caption of the recording, a commanding officer tells one of the protesting troops that he will tie the man up like a sheep, bring him to the front lines and "no one will find you again."

After the officer yells at the soldier to "get up," a gunshot can be heard.

Newsweek reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense via email for comment.

WarTranslated pulled the video from the Telegram channel for Mobilization News, which the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank described recently as a Russian opposition news outlet.

In its summary of the events, Mobilization News said the commander had fired his gun at the ground. The outlet also reported that the soldiers were mobilized from the 34th "Storm" brigade and had originally refused to return to the front lines a month earlier.

The men had reportedly been threatened with criminal cases and placed in a village in the Luhansk region while they waited for a decision about charges. The audio reportedly captures the moment when officers returned to take at least some of the soldiers back to an area near Bakhmut.

Another officer on the recording is identified as a major, and he asks the troops why they are afraid. After one soldier said they were not "intimidated" by fighting, the major said he can not help them avoid the new deployment orders.

"I helped you out twice. You weren't taken. Now, I can't help you," he said, according to WarTranslated.

WarTranslated has also posted previous examples of Russian military personnel denouncing instructions from commanding officers. Earlier this month, the account shared a video of Russian troops saying they were refusing to follow "senseless and suicidal orders," which came after a video from a week earlier of men announcing they would not return to the "meat grinder" of the front lines.

"They just came again and said we need to go to zero line at [the Zaporizhzhia region village of] Priyutny to the meat grinder again," a soldier said in that video. "We surrender to military police. If any of us die here, it wouldn't be on the zero line. It would mean we were killed by our own here, not in combat."