⚠️ Our Wars, GRAPHIC ⚠️

Russian MT-LB crushing a fellow soldier reportedly recently.

A slew of videos showing Russian soldiers killing themselves by either bullet, grenade, or resigning to death by drone without surrender have emerged significantly in this past month, but overall, increasingly over the past year since the beginning of 2023. This trend wasn't non-existent before, occasionally with even videos of Ukrainians soldiers doing the same in dire circumstances, and perhaps that was due to limitations of drone footage released/distributed, but claims from Russian POWs and deserters about orders to avoid surrender by all means necessary reveal some of the context to these deaths. Depression, suicide, and self-harm continue to be looming social ailments for Russians, especially men who in Russia proportionally kill themselves over five times more than women. There were 15,748 deaths in Russia in 2021, a rate of 10.7 per 100,000 people. As well, an estimated 20 times higher rate of attempts of suicide in that same time period: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8992693/ At the end of the summer of 2023, Andriy Yusov, the representative of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) of the Ministry of Defense, stated a significant increase in suicides among Russian military personnel, especially officers, following the onset of the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war. He assured that Ukraine is ready to accept those Russians who do not want to carry out criminal orders and surrender—from privates to generals and commanders—within the framework of the ‘I want to live’ (Я хочу жить) project. “We guarantee the treatment (of those who surrendered, - ed.) in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law, despite the fact that we are talking about murderers and aggressors,” Yusov said. The Kyiv Post reports that one Russian POW they spoke to last year said he was told by his commanders that it's better to use a grenade to kill himself and any enemies approaching rather than surrender and face “torture." – https://www.kyivpost.com/post/23861