Kyiv
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Russian soldiers call the practice a sacrifice to Baba Yaga, a fearsome witch from Slavic folklore who feasts on her victims.
A Russian serviceman is seen on video being tied up to a tree and abandoned to his fate – possibly death – at the hands of one of Ukraine’s large attack drones.
Why this is happening is clear from a radio intercept about a similar incident, shared with CNN, in which a Russian commander can clearly be heard ordering a subordinate be tied up in this way as punishment for desertion.
The instruction is given twice: “Hide him somewhere (while the fighting is ongoing) then take him out and tie him to a tree … in the next half hour.”
A Ukrainian drone battalion commander, says he has observed it happen twice and heard it happening on radio intercepts many more times.
“Any large Ukrainian drone they call Baba Yaga. It spreads terrible panic in these damaged people. For them, it’s some kind of scary myth that flies in and kills everyone,” the commander, who goes by the callsign Munin, told CNN.
The practice is one of a sickening array of battlefield mistreatments recorded on video either by Ukrainian surveillance drones or Russian servicemen and then circulated on social media.
As Moscow’s forces make slow but seemingly inexorable progress inside Ukraine, the videos paint a grim picture of the realities of life inside Putin’s army – a service which tens of thousands of Russian men are estimated to have fled since the start of the full-scale invasion in early 2022.
In the video, apparently filmed last winter, the man is shown in close-up, tied to a tree.
The man says he is from Kamensk-Uralsky, a city in Russia’s center, on the eastern side of the Ural Mountains.
He explains that he fled his post after being spooked by a Ukrainian drone flying overhead. A fellow soldier who caught up with him then made him an offer, he says.
“Let me make you ‘300’ so you’ll be withdrawn,” the soldier had said, using a term signifying a wounded fighter in the Russian army.
Then came the quid pro quo.
“You shoot me, and I will shoot you.”
The man tells the camera he refused but says the other soldier shot him anyway, rendering him an easy capture by men from his unit. With a thick cable now tethering him to the tree, he looks nervously to the skies as a voice behind the camera tells him there is a drone on the way.
“(If the drone) comes here, she’s going to drop everything on you,” the voice taunts.
At this point, the clip ends, the soldier’s fate unclear.
Desperate appeals to Putin
In common with many armies, Russia does not talk publicly about desertion in the ranks. But social media channels – usually Telegram – provide a glimpse into the deep anxieties and desperation felt by many soldiers and their families and give a sense of why some Russian servicemen chose to quit.
“Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich,” begins one video posted to Telegram by a man identified as Yuri Duryagin, in what amounts to a personal appeal to Russia’s President Putin for help.
Duryagin says he was fighting in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, where poor equipment and a lack of ammunition meant only 32 men from his company survived one particular assault. Typically, a company might have up to 150 personnel.
He tells Putin he has received less than a fifth of his salary but adds his superiors tell him he would be wasting his time complaining.
When deaths occurred on the battlefield, they were often covered up to avoid paying compensation to families of the bereaved.
“I personally saw comrades die before my eyes. They were killed. Parents tried to find out information about their relatives and loved ones, but they were told that the person was missing,” he says.
Perhaps most damning of all, he appears to accuse one commander of shooting those who refuse to take part, saying he “put people up against the wall because they simply refused to go up against a machine gun.”
‘They will all be dead in a week’
“Violence is what is keeping the Russian army going and what is glueing it together,” said Grigory Sverdlin, founder of Get Lost, an organization helping Russian men to desert, or to avoid conscription in the first place. He spoke to CNN from Barcelona, Spain, where the organization is now based.
Get Lost has helped 1,700 people to desert since it was launched six months into the full-scale invasion, Sverdlin claims. The total number of desertions from the Russian army is hard to determine but he estimates it to be in the tens of thousands.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US-based analysis group, cites what it says is leaked data from Russia’s Defense Ministry that suggests it could be as high as 50,000.
Many desert before they are deployed, complaining of poor training lasting just one to three weeks, Sverdlin said, while those who quit during deployment often describe a culture marked by nihilism.
“Their lives are not worth anything to their commanders. For Russian officers, losing a tank, losing a vehicle, is much worse than losing, say, 10 or 20 people,” Sverdlin said.
“We often hear from our clients that officers tell them they will all be dead in a week. The officer will get another unit, so it’s not a problem for them.”
For Russian soldiers convicted of desertion, the sentence can be up to 15 years in prison. But the videos circulated on social media indicate ad hoc punishments are also widely carried out on the ground, with the same aim of deterring others from running away.
In one, a man behind a camera approaches a large metal storage tank with a ladder on the side.
“Time to feed the animals! The ones who tried to f**k off! Let’s find out what they are doing,” the man’s voice says, sliding open the container lid to reveal three men stripped to their underwear hunkered down inside.
“You hungry?” the voice taunts. “Do you want a cookie?”
One of the men nods and a biscuit is crumbled into his outspread hands, which he quickly eats.
Another video shows a man cowering on the ground as he is kicked repeatedly in the face. He has an orange belt tied to one of his ankles. The other end is attached to a jeep, which drives off at speed, circling a field, dragging the man bouncing behind it in a punishment known colloquially as “the carousel.”
And in another, a man is tied to a tree with a rusty bucket over his head. After the bucket is removed, he is kicked repeatedly in the face before apparently being urinated on.
CNN reached out to Russia’s Ministry of Defense for comment on the punishment of deserters shown in the videos but did not receive a reply.
Estimates by Western governments and academic institutions put the number of Russians killed or wounded since February 2022 at about one million. NATO’s secretary general said recently that 100,000 Russian soldiers had died in 2025 alone.
Ukraine has its own problems with morale and desertion but one sentiment is likely far less prevalent among its ranks: lack of belief in the cause.
Sverdlin said this is what he hears voiced most often from the Russian soldiers he helps to desert.
“Some of them just tell us ‘I don’t want to die here,’ but I would say the most common words are ‘it’s not my war, it’s not our war … I don’t understand what the hell we are doing here.’”