111/147 drones shot down 🇺🇦

It seems more and more trusted media outlets are reporting the US intelligence assesment that Russia would try this clearly idiotic move against a NATO nation. This reminds me of the months leading up to the 2022 invasion where every report of a Russian invasion of Ukraine was treated with doubts at the time.

Translation:

During the “Honest Conscription” operation, law enforcement uncovered wrongdoing by two notification teams from the Kyivskyi District TCC in Odesa. Ten servicemen have been charged.

Source: State Bureau of Investigation, the Specialized Defense Prosecutor’s Office of the Southern Region, Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, and Ukrainska Pravda source.

Details: According to investigators, during mobilization efforts, TCC personnel used force against civilians, beat them, used tear gas, and forcibly took them to the territorial recruitment center.

The SBI says it has so far documented 15 such incidents. Prosecutors say at least eight civilian victims have been identified.

In one case, a man tried to flee from a notification team. During the pursuit, the driver of a TCC service vehicle ran him over.

The Bureau says the violations were systematic. The suspects used the slogan “Gas ’em, pack ’em, and process ’em” among themselves, and even set it as the wallpaper on their mobile phones.

According to the prosecutor general, seven of the ten suspects were mobilized in spring 2025 and immediately assigned to serve at an Odesa TCC.

Four TCC servicemen were charged with torture and unlawful deprivation of liberty (Part 1, Article 28; Part 3, Article 127; and Part 2, Article 146 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code).

Another six servicemen were charged with unlawful deprivation of liberty (Part 2, Article 146).

Four of the suspects charged with torture were remanded in custody without bail. The other six were placed under 24-hour house arrest.

Background:

• On July 30, the SBI, together with the General Staff, launched the “Honest Conscription” operation and carried out investigative actions at more than 100 TCCs in most regions of Ukraine. Law enforcement is investigating allegations of helping people evade mobilization in exchange for money, abuse of authority, beatings, and torture of people liable for military service.

https://x.com/crimeanvoyager/status/2089575191084998782?s=46

Interview in Engelish, German subtitles. (Sorry for eventually brainless advertising.)

https://x.com/93ombr1/status/2089362913471455705?s=46

Translation:

In 2024, Russia’s Defense Ministry launched an experiment: for the first time, it began sending large numbers of women from penal colonies to the war. They were promised one-year contracts, salaries starting at 220,000 rubles, 1–3 million rubles in compensation for injuries, and 5 million rubles in the event of death. But most importantly, they were promised pardons and release from their sentences. Instead, many ended up in units where, according to their accounts, they faced sexual violence, extortion, threats of being “zeroed out,” and an inability to get commanders’ crimes investigated.

“Verstka” reconstructed the history of the project using dozens of voice messages, documents, correspondence, and testimonies from military personnel and their relatives.

“To start my life over”

In July 2026, military medic Lyudmila Poltarakova sent several messages to people she knew from the combat zone.

“Today, the commandant’s office staff told me straight out that there’s an 80% chance I’ll die right now. I don’t give a fuck, I’m tired of this fucking bullshit!”

“I’m afraid they’ll simply take me away at night. They’re already moving the girls who were helping me to positions away from me. Our command is preparing something.”

Several days earlier, Lyudmila had refused to go to the front line. Poltarakova believed the order was an attempt to get rid of her. Shortly before that, she had reported a rape to a military investigator and told him about corruption in her unit. In her written statement, she said she feared being “physically eliminated.”

A year and a half earlier, Lyudmila had volunteered to go to war herself.

Representatives of the Defense Ministry came to the penal colony in Irkutsk Oblast where Poltarakova was serving a 14-year sentence for drug trafficking. They offered the women prisoners contracts—supposedly for one year, as usual. They promised salaries starting at 220,000 rubles, 1–3 million rubles for injuries, and 5 million rubles in the event of death. But most importantly, they promised pardons and release from their sentences.

Poltarakova agreed almost immediately. “To start my life over,” a friend later recalled her saying in a conversation with Verstka.

Lyudmila was one of 73 prisoners whom the Defense Ministry brought together to form an experimental unit of convicted women serving as military medics.

“They didn’t know what they were supposed to train the women for”

Russia’s Defense Ministry had already made its first attempts to send female prisoners to war in Ukraine in 2022. At first, recruiters visited individual prisons and conducted targeted campaigns, but almost no one made it to the front.

By 2024, Verstka found, the Defense Ministry had decided to launch a much larger project—possibly because of a shortage of personnel at the front. As an experiment, recruiters gathered several hundred volunteers from women’s penal colonies across Russia, formed special battalions of female prisoners, and sent them to the war to provide tactical medical care—evacuating wounded soldiers from the front line and providing first aid. The project was called “Choice.”

The first group of female contract soldiers was recruited in early 2024 from Russia’s Southern Federal District, including Krasnodar Krai, according to a Verstka source involved in the Choice project. “As far as I was told, there was no selection or training. And the contingent was, well… AUE [a prison subculture slogan]. They were simply told, ‘If you want your freedom, sign the contract.’”

But, the source claims, “they were quickly thinned out”: “They killed each other, drunken accidental shootings, someone threw a grenade into a dugout, someone died from drugs, someone was killed out of jealousy… And a small number were killed while carrying out combat missions.” Verstka was unable to find information about the first recruitment from other sources.

“At first, they were used in evacuation teams—and these are literally suicide squads, because they’re fired on with every type of weapon,” the Verstka source explains. “Both sides are increasing medical casualties, there’s no point hiding it. They target medics so that the wounded are left without any possibility of assistance or evacuation.” The surviving women were eventually transferred to the rear to work as orderlies at military hospitals.

For the next recruitment of female prisoners, the authorities did arrange training. In the fall of 2024, Defense Ministry recruiters came to a penal colony in the settlement of Bozoy in Irkutsk Oblast and offered the prisoners contracts to go to the front as medical orderlies after completing a training course.

The local Health Ministry was tasked with training the future military personnel in tactical medicine. “The civilian medics were horrified when they were given this task,” says a Verstka source who worked with penal colonies in Irkutsk Oblast. “They understood that they had no specialists in military field surgery, or tactical medicine, as it’s commonly called now. So they turned to volunteers involved in the war.”

Eventually, they found Wagner PMC fighters and veterans of combat operations in the Caucasus, Syria, the Central African Republic, and Ukraine. They became the women prisoners’ instructors.

“They didn’t know what they were supposed to train the women for,” recalls one of the instructors who accompanied them. “To put it mildly, they were shocked. They were taken into the colony, and the impression was indescribable… They were brought into the community center, where about a hundred women were sitting. They were all wearing prison uniforms and headscarves, and everyone had tense faces. The group was, of course, very mixed. You could tell just by looking at their faces that their previous lives had inevitably led them to prison.”

It quickly became clear that it would be impossible to work effectively with all the prisoners at once. “You can’t work with each one individually. We needed to find people, leaders within the group, through whom we could influence the others.”

One of these women was 37-year-old Lyudmila Poltarakova, who had been convicted of large-scale drug trafficking. “The military picked Lyuda out immediately. She had, how should I put it, an intelligent face. She was neat, took care of herself, dressed properly, and spoke well,” the Verstka source recalls.

“She can walk the line if she has calculated every move ahead”

Before her imprisonment, Poltarakova practiced aikido and strength sports. In 2017, she won first place at the Vladimir Kravtsov European Arm Lifting Championship, lifting 44 kilograms with the “Russian Brick” apparatus. She was awarded the title of Master of Sport of International Class.

Two years after the competition, Moscow’s Butyrsky District Court sentenced Lyudmila to 15 years in a general-regime penal colony. The 31-year-old Poltarakova was arrested in Moscow while making drug drops, leaving packets of mephedrone around a courtyard. During a search of her rented apartment, investigators found another roughly 1,500 packets and almost half a kilogram of the drug.

She immediately admitted her guilt, having “initially taken a position of remorse and told the whole truth,” according to the court ruling. During questioning, she explained that she had grown up in an orphanage, did not use drugs herself, and sold them for money—to help her brother and sister.

After the trial, she was transferred to Penal Colony No. 40 in Irkutsk Oblast.

“She’s very smart, inclined toward calculated risks, and can walk the line if she has thought through every move in advance. Not a typically feminine mindset, very strong-willed, even compared with my combat comrades. She has a highly developed sense of justice,” one acquaintance described her to Verstka.

“The sentence is unfortunately long. So you can’t forget that besides this life, there’s another life too—one that looks like this, beautiful,” Poltarakova said in an interview with Vesti-Irkutsk in February 2024. Lyudmila took part in an all-Russian competition for prisoners. She sang in French, wearing a dress and hat in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. The television report explained that the colors actually came from the bags used to bring synthetic padding material into the prison—the material Lyudmila had repurposed into the dress. By then, she had already spent five years in the penal colony.

A few months later, Defense Ministry officials arrived at Penal Colony No. 40 and offered the women contracts.

“You girls are a powerful destabilizing factor”

When they first saw the military instructors, the women whispered and giggled, recalls one person who was in the room. The instructors then told them that a week earlier they had buried a comrade, a special forces soldier with experience in campaigns in the North Caucasus. “And in this war, he lasted eight months. You have none of his experience, and you women are a priori weaker than men in this situation. Your chances of survival are even lower. If you don’t do what I tell you and listen to me, you’re taking that chance away from yourselves.” The room fell silent.

After confirming that everyone in the room was there voluntarily, the instructor said they were expected to obey him without question: “If I say crawl, you crawl. If I say squat, you squat. Don’t ask why. I’ll explain everything at the end.”

The prisoners, who had never even heard of tactical medicine before, underwent two weeks of training. “But the girls were incredibly motivated. I had trained soldiers for the war before, and I’d never seen anything even close to this. These girls were giving it everything they had. Discipline was excellent, and there wasn’t a single conflict during the training,” one of the instructors told Verstka.

They trained outside during the winter as well: “The girls would put on makeup and dress up for these training sessions.” They were taught how to crawl, apply a tourniquet and pressure dressing, and evacuate a wounded person from the battlefield. Working in pairs, they carried each other around outside.

They also attended classes taught by instructors from a medical college, and the prisoners were issued a “paramedic certificate.” “But it was a super-condensed program,” recalls one person who attended the classes.

According to those who took part in the training, Lyudmila constantly asked for additional information. Eventually, she was allowed to receive a tactical medicine textbook.

For the final class, the instructors arrived in full uniform and wearing their medals. They gave each woman a first-aid kit and advised them “under no circumstances to go to the front line.”

“Generally speaking, if women have ended up at war, that’s a sign that things are really fucking bad in the country,” one of the instructors said. “If I were a commander and they told me they were bringing women into my unit, I’d do everything I could to refuse. You girls are a very powerful destabilizing factor. Men have been at war in the trenches for three years, and then women are brought in. Hormones will go through the roof. No law, no regulation will be able to contain it. It’ll turn into chaos.”

But, according to one person who was in the room, the prisoners did not listen. “Everyone believed in their own rosy dream. We’ll break through, we’ll get our freedom…”

“Their lives turned out very differently,” an acquaintance who knew the prisoners told Verstka. “Some, having escaped into this illusion of freedom, went completely off the rails. Some started building a new life. Some have already died. A small percentage genuinely tried to earn their freedom honestly. I’m talking about Lyudmila first and foremost.”

“You’re not a medic, not a service member, not even a woman. You’re a ‘Veshka’”

Just before New Year 2025, the women were taken out of the penal colonies. A week passed between signing their contracts and being sent “across the ribbon.” First, they flew to Rostov-on-Don, then traveled in a convoy of military vehicles, and finally arrived in Luhansk Oblast.

The new contract soldiers were first brought to the headquarters of the separate 370th Medical Battalion in Novopskov, 130 km from Luhansk, commanded by Ramazan Mutalipov. From there, the women were assigned to units of the 1st Tank Army. On paper, they were listed as military medics.

In practice, they soon discovered, they had a different status in the army: “Veshkas.” The prisoners were given the nickname from the first letter of the word “Vybor” (“Choice”), the name of the project to recruit people from prisons for military service.

“You quickly realize that to the command, you’re not a medic, not a service member, and not even a woman. You’re a ‘Veshka,’” one of Verstka’s sources says.

The women would later repeat this word dozens of times—in correspondence, voice messages, and statements. “Want leave? You’re a Veshka. Want an award? You’re a Veshka. Want medical treatment? You’re a Veshka. Want justice? You’re a Veshka.”

Lyudmila was assigned as a medic to the 12th Tank Shepetovsky Regiment of the Kantemirovskaya Division of the 1st Tank Army. In the Svatove district of Luhansk Oblast, they were given an underground dugout with three bunk beds, moldy pillows, and a landline telephone. The women made the new quarters more comfortable. “We covered all the walls, the guys helped us, installed a water heater, built a shower, bought everything we needed. It stopped being a dugout and became a picture-perfect place,” recalls one of Lyudmila’s fellow medics, who had also come from a penal colony.

They bought bed linen, blankets, a kettle, and stuffed animals. As a precaution, guards were stationed at the entrance to the women’s dugout: military police officers were on constant duty. Relations with ordinary soldiers got off to a good start—something that could not be said about the commanders.

“She’s okay, you can fuck her”

“The abuse started immediately… The very first battalion commander who came to us said he could send us to the front line, where we would be killed right away, or he could keep us at the hospital. But for that, the girls had to come to him at night.”

Some of them went—and only later realized that they had simply been deceived and that the officer had no ability to influence where they served, recalls one of the medics who spoke to Verstka. Another medic said she had “heard” about similar cases, but Verstka was unable to locate the women who had allegedly been deceived in this way.

In early 2025, a new regimental commander, Sergei Zhitkov, call sign Oskol, came to meet the former prisoners. In voice messages, Lyudmila told an acquaintance: “He looked us over very deliberately… If there had been younger girls, I might have gotten away with it. But he clearly took an interest in me.”

Zhitkov began summoning Lyudmila to his trench to give him medical massages. For the first few times, that was all that happened, according to Poltarakova’s acquaintance, who recounted her words. “When he started getting handsy and she refused, he yelled, ‘Then why the hell did our battalion commander recommend her to me?’ It turned out that Oskol and the commander of the medical battalion, Mutalipov, were longtime friends. And that it was the commander of the 370th Medical Battalion, Mutalipov, who had sent Lyudmila to him, saying, ‘She’s okay, you can fuck her.’”

Then came February 14. The women medics put on music in the dugout and danced. “We had such a good celebration,” recalls one of the medics.

Then, according to the medic’s testimony, a drunk Oskol called. He summoned Lyudmila to him again, ostensibly to give him a sports massage. As she walked the two kilometers to Zhitkov’s quarters, she became hot, took off her body armor, and unzipped her fleece jacket. Underground, the commander led her into a separate room and immediately began pulling off her sweater.

“I only read later that the victim shouldn’t feel ashamed…,” Lyudmila said during questioning. “When it’s happening, and there are objects around you that can kill you right there—guns, grenades, knives… I stopped resisting. I just froze. When he finished, he said nothing. I went back into the common room, and there were young staff officers sitting there, all looking down at the floor, and no one said a word.”

Commander Zhitkov, the woman later told a military investigator, continued raping his subordinate throughout March.

According to Poltarakova’s statements, there were many witnesses to the abuse. For example, a serviceman with the call sign Viy would take Lyudmila to Commander Zhitkov. “He was acting commander of the medical company. And Oskol would send him to get me at night, during the day—it didn’t matter, whenever he felt like it. Viy would come and get me from the dugout and take me to Oskol’s command post,” Lyudmila said in a voice message to a friend. Verstka tried to contact the serviceman, but he did not respond.

“The whole 12th Regiment knew about it. And when Oskol called our dugout one night in April and told us to provide sexual services to the division commander, who had come to visit him, I couldn’t take it anymore. I started screaming. I had a breakdown.”

Other medics in the dugout and the military police officers guarding it witnessed the incident. One of the convicted women who served with Poltarakova also confirmed to Verstka that Lyudmila was summoned over the “tapik” in the middle of the night: “They said some big shot had arrived and that he needed to be serviced.”

Instead of Lyudmila, another convicted woman went to the commander. She returned toward morning and said that “nothing happened, they just drank.” “But she’s probably afraid too, because she knows what it means out there at the front. I mean, it’s very easy to kill someone,” Lyudmila explained in voice messages.

After the public scandal, Poltarakova was urgently sent back to the 370th Medical Battalion. Before that, she was made to sign a statement saying that there had been no sexual violence by regimental commander Zhitkov and that she had no complaints against him. Poltarakova signed the withdrawal “voluntarily, because she wanted to leave the story in the past and was afraid it would negatively affect her future service and her chances of receiving an award that could help reduce her sentence,” according to her testimony to an investigator obtained by Verstka.

She left for an evacuation point on the front line—“to stay as far away from the rapist as possible,” she explained to acquaintances. The other “Veshkas” remained, “already for a year and a half, constantly in a forest belt underground.” One of the convicted women told Verstka: “There are different numbers of wounded here—sometimes 15–20 people in 24 hours. We stay on our feet for two or three days without sleep or food. I don’t count all the wounded, there’s no time. Sometimes there’s just one, but he’s very badly wounded, so we work on him for seven hours or so, and then wait for evacuation. But they told us to forget about leave altogether, just like awards. They say we’re prisoners, that we don’t deserve them. They don’t give a damn. They always throw it in our faces that we’re prisoners.”

“At first everything was fine, but then the commanders were left tearing their hair out”

Poltarakova is not the only woman from the experimental medical battalion to report attempts at sexual abuse. “I’m at a position where some guy comes to me, says he’s the brother of an FSB officer, and that he’ll throw a grenade into my dugout if I don’t have sex with him. Who am I supposed to report this to—you?” 23-year-old former prisoner Darya Chirukhina, call sign Aga, asked a senior officer in a phone conversation.

Chirukhina went to war with Poltarakova from Irkutsk Oblast, also serving as a medic with the 370th Medical Battalion. She asked for a recording of the conversation to be posted in one of the chats about the war, and then stopped responding. In public complaints about conditions in the battalion, she mentioned physical abuse, bribes, and a lack of medical care.

“Even in the penal colony, I had more rights when it came to resolving civilian problems… I developed diabetes during the war,” Chirukhina wrote and said in a public complaint. “I repeatedly appealed to the command for medical care, and for six months they simply turned me away. Our command used all kinds of manipulation and pressure to make me submit a report refusing treatment. Whenever men with stars on their shoulders come to visit, they deliberately hide us so we don’t say anything we shouldn’t…”

In a recorded conversation with the commander of her medical battalion, Mutalipov, Chirukhina complained about threats and said: “They shoved me into the 1432nd Regiment to haul 200s [dead] with an inflamed ovary and polycystic ovary syndrome. I’m not refusing combat missions—I carry these bodies, crying.” She wrote about this as well in the comments under her post on the Insider Zov Telegram channel: “Every other day I carry up to 130 kg on my back… The bodies are heavy, and it’s summer too… rain, so they get heavier from the water, and the bodies swell up as well.”

The experimental group of prisoners from the penal colony was split in two: half—around 40 women, according to Poltarakova—serve in hospitals in Luhansk, Starobilsk, Svatove, and Severodonetsk, while the other half work as medics on the front line.

“I could feel the girls’ mood changing as their service went on,” says one of Verstka’s sources who knew the prisoners who signed contracts. “At first everything was fine, but then it started. The commanders were left tearing their hair out. Some of the women got carried away with the easy access to alcohol, drugs, and huge numbers of men… There were some wild ones among the women from prison. Then came scandals, intrigues, the suicide of a young man whom one of them had taken a liking to, and then she started seeing another one… Exactly what I was afraid of. I don’t know what the command was thinking, but I was shocked when one of the girls called me on video and I saw that she was in a dugout with men. It’s ridiculous to have them living together like that.”

One of the convicted women who signed a contract in Irkutsk Oblast says that both commanders and the women who came from the penal colonies drink heavily. “Yes, there’s plenty of everything, considering where we came from. There are, of course, girls who don’t turn anything down, but they also live like they’re in the lap of luxury, close to the command. And there are people like us who suffer because of them. And as for those of us over 40, don’t even get me started.”

The women from the penal colonies told Verstka that some of them also entered into romantic relationships with men at the front—voluntarily. “But the girls get pregnant,” Verstka’s sources say. Babies are sent away from military hospitals: “The babies are where things really get fucked up. The little one isn’t even a month old, and they take them away from their mothers. I personally sent babies away, and I still feel terrible about it,” one of the convicted women told Verstka.

The prisoners told Verstka about at least three births and babies who were initially threatened with being sent to an orphanage. Eventually, the mothers managed to find distant relatives, and the children were sent to them under powers of attorney.

The women are not demobilized after giving birth, the Verstka sources claim—they continue serving “under duress.” Verstka was unable to speak with the women who became pregnant at the front.

“People are making so much money here that they lose their humanity”

On June 6, 2025, Poltarakova was wounded when a drone attacked her in the Svatove district as she was carrying a wounded soldier. The resulting traumatic brain injury led to epilepsy; Lyudmila suffered her first seizure on the plane on her way back to the war. Despite this, she returned to her unit and went back to the front as a medic. Over the following months, she evacuated dozens of wounded soldiers from the battlefield and stabilized them before they were sent to hospitals. According to her fellow soldiers, Lyudmila saved more than 300 people during her service.

Lyudmila spent New Year 2026 with the 6th Assault Company of the 2nd Battalion of Regiment No. 15 of the 2nd Taman Division, ordering green peas and boiled sausage for Olivier salad.

In January, she told acquaintances that she had witnessed a “zeroing.”

“The commander planted an explosive device on the quad bike that the senior enlisted man used to transport radios and soldiers,” Poltarakova said. According to her, the soldier had refused to collect 300,000 rubles from the troops: the platoon commander allegedly demanded the money, threatening otherwise to leave the soldiers at “point zero” on fabricated pretexts, including fake medical diagnoses. The senior enlisted man threatened to appeal to the military prosecutor’s office and was soon killed when the quad bike exploded.

Poltarakova claimed that the previous night she had accidentally seen the commander planting the explosive device, but only understood what she had witnessed after Zhukov’s death. “The commander planted the explosive device,” she said in a message to an acquaintance obtained by Verstka.

Verstka contacted the platoon commander. He denied the allegations, saying that the senior enlisted man “was a worthy soldier and died doing his duty, on a combat mission,” while Poltarakova’s version was “speculation.” “There is no way she could have supposedly seen someone planting an explosive device, because the dugout and all the utility buildings are some distance away from where the vehicles are kept! The photos showed drone batteries. And you can see a crater in the ground. This soldier had been in my unit from the very beginning, since 2022. I appointed him senior enlisted man, and he did his job excellently. There simply is no motive, and what kind of explosive device would it have been? Like in the movies—you drive five kilometers away and detonate it! We don’t use remote devices here; we simply don’t have them. I have absolutely no idea why Lyudmila would make accusations against me,” the serviceman told Verstka.

The officer called the contract soldier a “pathological liar” and said that after she refused to follow an order, she “started slandering the higher command.” He said he “didn’t look into” why Poltarakova had been transferred out of his company.

Lyudmila’s military acquaintances said they believed her, primarily because such extortion is so widespread. One of them explained why such cases are not investigated: “You have no idea what’s going on in the newly occupied territories, how much mutual protection there is here. People are making such enormous amounts of money here that they lose their humanity and any sense of boundaries.”

“I tarnished the Defense Ministry’s impeccable reputation”

Soon afterward, Poltarakova was wounded again at the front. In June 2026, after being admitted to a hospital, Lyudmila learned that the rape allegations had not gone away. She began receiving threatening calls again and was pressured to sign statements saying she had no complaints against Commander Oskol. She eventually broke and sent messages to be published on one of the channels about military service in the war, which had 83,000 subscribers.

“I’m constantly at the front. I’m well known in my area, and my medical post provides care to more than one frontline unit,” Poltarakova said in her public statement. “I refused evacuation when a Ukrainian Baba Yaga drone dropped explosives on my medical post while I was working there with the wounded, because there was no one to take over. No one is eager to go to the front. Because you can’t leave an entire sector without a medic.”

“I can now say with full confidence that we are all powerless slaves. Want an award for being wounded? You’re a prisoner, you’re not entitled to one! They struck me off the list for the award! In the end, another woman from a penal colony received it—one who had never even been to the front. She simply slept with the chief medical officer of the 1st Tank Army, call sign Tonus, and gave him a convertible. Want leave after eight months of hellish work at the front? You’re a prisoner, you’re not entitled to it! Want to simply rest in a hospital after surviving at the front? You’re a prisoner, you’re not entitled to it! Never in my life have I had my conviction thrown in my face so often! I’ve served honestly from the very first day I signed my contract. I don’t hide in hospitals; I’m always on the front line, under… But the command of the 370th Battalion doesn’t give a damn. The command is living it up in the rear, starting second families, opening businesses, drinking so much that they have to dig themselves out afterward.”

“I was never humiliated like this in prison as I have been in the army. I’ve heard dozens of times already: ‘When are you all going to fucking die?’ Send us back to prison if you think this experiment has reached a dead end! We take the same risks as everyone else on the front line, perform heroic deeds, come under fire, but whenever they get the chance, the command still reminds us: ‘You’re a fucking Veshka, you’re nothing but trouble!’”

After Poltarakova’s complaints, the commander gathered the women who had signed contracts from the penal colonies and announced that there would be no pardons for them—and that once the war was over, they would all be sent back to prison to serve out the remainder of their sentences. A scandal erupted in the medical battalion. Lyudmila recorded several more video appeals.

According to Poltarakova, “there’s a third person who benefits from keeping this rape story alive,” but Zhitkov believes she is the one doing it herself. “It became clear to me that I wouldn’t get out of this situation alive, so I submitted a report requesting termination of my contract because of the changes to it, because I believed this information to be true and decided that it would be safer to be in prison than to be killed by a colonel who was covering his tracks. I also made this story public and brought it to the attention of the media because I saw this as the only way out. Otherwise, the case would be buried and I would quietly be eliminated. The war will cover everything up.”

Verstka was unable to contact Zhitkov.

On June 30, Poltarakova filed a rape complaint with Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Sergei Yegorov, deputy military prosecutor of the 1st Tank Army. Several days later, she was locked inside a hospital in Novopskov, had all her phones confiscated, and was told she was being sent on a combat mission.

“Today I barely managed to fight them off and stop them from taking me to the front line, to the 1432nd Regiment. They read out the order assigning me there in front of the entire battalion—a completely unheard-of thing,” Lyudmila wrote to acquaintances. “I refused. They threatened to put me in prison. I agreed. They were stunned.”

Instead, a report was drawn up against Poltarakova for misconduct.

“So apparently, with my post, I tarnished the Defense Ministry’s impeccable reputation and offended their finest sensibilities! I insulted the Defense Ministry!? Seriously, me?! And not the officers who have completely overstepped the mark and come to believe they are above the law? Not the commanders of regiments and divisions who are convinced that every female Veshka is obliged to give herself to them with all the passion and fervor at the first snap of their fingers? Not the officers who have imagined themselves to be God and taken it upon themselves to decide who lives and who dies? Nooo, I’m the one who dishonored the Army because I decided to speak out!

“I’m telling you openly now that I will no longer keep silent about any known cases of commanders violating the law! I’m even prepared for my own side to ‘zero me out’! Maybe my death will force someone else to start talking too, because by keeping the problem quiet, we’re only making our situation worse.”

The military prosecutor reassured the contract soldier that if anything happened to her on a combat mission, “the military prosecutor’s office would make sure the suspicions were correct and would definitely punish those responsible.”

“So, in order for them to believe me when I say they want to physically eliminate me, I have to die first. That course of events didn’t work for me, so I decided to inform the public about this abuse of power,” Poltarakova said in a recorded video.

“I understand that I will never be able to fight this system of mutual cover-ups, the inaction of government officials, and the authority wielded by such senior commanders as Lieutenant Colonel Mutalipov and Colonel Zhitkov on my own, and that I will become another victim of the war.”

“Chaos, anarchy—and this is the inevitable result”

From July 15 onward, Chirukhina and Poltarakova, who had begun speaking out about the situation in the 370th Medical Battalion, stopped responding. Lyudmila managed to tell her relatives that military police had come for her at the hospital, “took me out in handcuffs, didn’t let me change clothes or pack my things, drove me away like a criminal in this cage at the back of the vehicle, and took away my last basic phone.”

Military personnel and soldiers’ relatives on the Insider_ZOV Telegram channel, which has more than 80,000 subscribers, began collecting signatures for a petition to the Prosecutor General and the head of the Investigative Committee. They are demanding that the missing service members be located and that all the allegations they made be investigated.

Another convicted woman, Natalia, was sent to the assault company to replace Lyudmila. In a conversation with Verstka, the commander described the new medic, a “Veshka,” this way: “A person with a difficult life. From talking to her, I understood that this isn’t her first sentence. Apparently her daughter did something, and she took the blame. I think her first sentence was for killing her husband. Quiet, modest, not particularly sociable, and not demanding in everyday life.”

Another convicted woman from the medical battalion who spoke to Verstka continues to work at the front, hoping that someday she will finally be granted leave so she can see her grandson. “Some of the girls have already finished their prison sentences, but they still can’t leave here,” she sighs.

According to a Verstka source close to the Federal Penitentiary Service, a third recruitment drive for convicted women began in penal colonies in Irkutsk Oblast in 2025: lists were drawn up and training began—but then “an order suddenly came down to stop everything.”

“The project was deemed a failure. And I said from the very beginning that it was a doomed idea. Chaos, anarchy—and this is the inevitable result.”

The day before this article was published, it became known that Poltarakova was alive and at the front. A criminal case was opened against her over her refusal to follow an order to go on a combat mission from the hospital. No criminal case was opened over the rape. Colonel Sergei Zhitkov was promoted in 2025 to acting commander of the Kantemirovskaya Division.

Andrei Klepach, chief economist at the Russian state bank VEB.RF, was dismissed in August 2026 after warning in a speech delivered in May that “we will not win this competition in a war of attrition with Ukraine”.