Russia is increasingly sending mentally disabled and medically unfit men to the front lines in Ukraine, according to The Telegraph investigation based on Ukrainian intelligence reports and interviews with officials on November 6.
Footage verified by Ukrainian sources shows a visibly emaciated, disoriented Russian soldier lying in a muddy ditch, stripped of his uniform and unable to move. Officials said the man was one of several mentally disabled recruits deployed to the front—part of what they described as Moscow’s growing dependence on vulnerable populations to sustain its offensive.
“These cases are not isolated and are quite systematic,” said Dmytro Zhmailo, executive director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre. He said Russia’s mounting losses have forced it to “recruit citizens regardless of their health or physical disabilities.”
Records shared with The Telegraph detail at least five cases of men with severe mental or developmental disorders pressed into combat. Among them was 27-year-old Semyon Karmanov, who was declared intellectually disabled as a child but later classified as fit for service by a prison medical commission. He was killed in eastern Ukraine this autumn.
Other documented cases include young men with psychiatric disorders coerced into signing military contracts under threat of prosecution. Many were later killed, captured, or vanished in combat. “They recruit people who don’t know anything… they arrive and immediately, they are dead,” one Russian soldier told The Telegraph from the front line near eastern Ukrainian town of Chasiv Yar.
Ukrainian commanders said such deployments reflect a broader Russian tactic: using overwhelming manpower to compensate for high casualty rates. “For Putin, every soldier is simply a means to an end,” said a Ukrainian officer identified only as Anna.
Colonel Oleksandr Zavtonov of Ukraine’s 30th Marine Corps added that Russian assaults, though small in scale, are relentless. “The enemy has no limits in the cost of human lives,” he said. “To the civilized world, it looks like cannibalistic tactics—for the Russians, it’s the norm.”
Previously, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia’s military losses in 2025 nearly equal the number of troops it mobilized that year, claiming Moscow failed to gain meaningful ground on the battlefield, he told Axios in an interview.
By CYRIL BARABALTCHOUK/United24Media
