Russia is executing its own soldiers in Ukraine if they disobey orders and is threatening to kill entire units if they retreat in the face of artillery barrages, the White House has claimed.
John Kirby, the national security spokesman, said the brutal methods were in effect as Russia mounted a desperate offensive around the city of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine.
He said Russia’s forces had suffered thousands of casualties in the offensive, “some of them on the orders of their own leaders”.
“We have information that the Russian military has been actually executing soldiers who refuse to follow orders,” he told a press briefing in Washington. “We also have information that Russian commanders are threatening to execute entire units if they seek to retreat from Ukrainian artillery fire.”
Kirby claimed that Russia had resorted to “human-wave tactics” with ill-prepared and under-equipped troops — “just throwing masses of these poorly trained soldiers right into the fight, no proper equipment, no leadership, no resourcing, no support”.
Advertisement
The UK Ministry of Defence said in November last year that Russia’s army has “probably” instructed special units of troops to fire on retreating soldiers in Ukraine in an echo of Stalinist doctrine during the Second World War.
“Due to low morale and reluctance to fight, Russian forces have probably started deploying ‘barrier troops’ or ‘blocking units’, ” the ministry said in an intelligence update. “These units threaten to shoot their own retreating soldiers in order to compel offensives.”
Joseph Stalin issued Order No. 227 in July 1942, a year after the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union and a month before the battle for Stalingrad. Known as “Not One Step Back”, it created penal battalions to be sent to the front lines and allowed for the creation of blocking detachments at the rear that would shoot “panic-mongers and cowards”.
The White House’s claims came as Hungary and Slovakia blocked a £43.6 billion EU aid package for Ukraine during a summit in Brussels.
“Everybody knows but they do not dare to say it out loud, that this strategy has failed,” Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, said. “The Ukrainians will not win on the front line.”
