Russian deserters are being imprisoned by their own army in medieval-style pits with metal grills on top.
Desperate and injured Russian soldiers said that they had been thrown into pits and denied food and water for refusing to fight or for heavy drinking.
“We are in the mud, in the rain, we are all wet. My colleagues’ faces were smashed,” one Russian soldier called Pavel Gorelov who identified himself as part of the 99th Regiment, said in a leaked video. “All we did was drink a little beer.”
In the video, several men wearing Russian military combat uniforms sit on the hard floor of the pit. Rainwater drips in. Several of the men appear badly injured, with bloody cuts across their swollen faces and black eyes. One man smokes a cigarette but is barely coherent.
“I’m begging for help from the prosecutor general,” Mr Gorelov says in the video. “You’ve seen these conditions now.”
In another video a different Russian soldier, possibly from the same unit, complains that he was being kept in an open pit.
Flarit Baitemirov explains that he was a volunteer soldier from Saratov in southern Russia and that he had been kept in the pit since the end of March.
“I am being held captive by my own side, the Russians. I am Russian,” he said
Open pits covered with grills called Zindans were used in Central Asia to keep prisoners and were often deployed by Imperial Russian armies. They were renowned for being overcrowded and disease-ridden. Exposed to the elements, inmates used to go mad as they glimpsed the outside world through the grill.
Russian soldiers have complained for months that military police throw them into overcrowded caves or pits without any food or water if they refuse to fight.
It is difficult to know exactly how many Russian soldiers are mutinying or deserting every day but analysts have said that it is probably hundreds.
Russian military tactics have not evolved since World War II and are based on sending waves of infantrymen across open ground against Ukraine machine gun posts and trenches.
The high casualty numbers produced by these tactics are spreading fear and discontent within the Russian army.
Desperate Russian soldiers have published dozens of videos this year pleading for senior commanders to rescue them from the chaos, death and destruction of the front line. Many of the people in the videos say they are left with no option other than mutinying.
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