Ates it’s a clandestine partisan military movement which is made up of Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars and anti-Putin Russians. It has been active since September 2022 (a few months after the Ukrainian war began) and carries out sabotage and resistance operations against Russian forces in occupied Ukrainian territories for the country led by .
The aforementioned military movement has assured that is falsifying the deaths of its Russian soldiers by passing them off as deserters to hide the heavy losses that Moscow is suffering in its offensive in the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.
As stated several Atesh agents infiltrated into the 30th Independent Mechanized Brigade have reported that Russian commanders are recordingdeliberately, the Russian soldiers killed in combat as absent without leave.
Specifically, always according to the version of the clandestine partisan military movement, the brigade would have created separate lists in which hundreds of names have been included as deserters when in fact they are deceased.
According to a report shared on Telegram by Atesh, this Russian practice is being carried out with both soldiers killed during the assaults on the city of Pokrovsk as with those who died due to barricade detachments.
Atesh also points out that Russian fighters are justified in this way of proceeding by telling them that “It is easier to declare an absence without permission than to explain to relatives where the body is.”
This strategy would be destroying the trust of Russian troops in their superiors. “Soldiers understand that at any time they can be ‘discharged’ as deserters, even if they die in combat. This causes fear, aggression and a rapid decline in morale. Discipline is broken, there is no trust in command and combat capacity deteriorates with each new assault,” Atesh’s report states.
