Russian assault troops spent days crawling through a pipe to reach Ukrainian lines, and most of them were killed before reaching the place. Russian soldiers walked 28 kilometers, then came under fire on emerging and ultimately surrendered, Ukraine's 71st Separate Air Assault Brigade reported.

This is a portrait of how Russia spends its infantry who enlist voluntarily for the war against Ukraine. The soldiers were sent on a grueling underground infiltration with bad information and no proper food, ordered forward despite wounds, and largely killed.

The 28-kilometer crawl

The group reached Ukrainian positions through underground infrastructure. The Russians covered about 27 to 28 kilometers moving inside a reinforced-concrete pipe roughly a meter and a half in diameter, spending three days on the way, sleeping inside the pipe, the 71st Brigade reports.

Their command had lied to them about what waited. The soldiers were told they were only going to reinforce a battalion and that there were no Ukrainian troops in the forest, a captured Russian says. On arrival, the opposite was true, and they were sent onward without a normal food supply, forced to forage on their own. Many of the assault troops, the prisoner said, are recruited from prison colonies, signing contracts to avoid long sentences.

From 16 to four

When the group emerged onto open ground, Ukrainian troops hit them. Of the 16 Russians who set out, only about 8 reached the forest, and later, just 4 survived.

The wounded were abandoned by their own side. Russian command was in no hurry to evacuate them, and despite wounds and Ukrainian drone strikes, the assault troops were ordered only to keep moving forward, per the captured soldier. The survivors eventually ran into fighters of the 71st Brigade, laid down their weapons, and asked the Ukrainians not to shoot.

"No money is worth this"

The captured soldier was given medical care and made an appeal to other Russians. He urged them not to go to war against Ukraine.

"I will not advise anyone to go to war. No money is worth this, nor any benefits they promise us. To die and go to a foreign land, for what? For whom? Let them put me in prison. As long as they don't send me here, I will never come here again," the prisoner said.

Serafim Hordiienko enlisted at 19 in 2022, fought as a mortarman near the front line, then moved into drone warfare as it grew central to Russia's war on Ukraine. In an interview with RBC-Ukraine, he pushed back on the idea that unmanned systems are phasing out infantry, arguing the two perform separate functions neither can absorb.

The debate is live inside Ukraine's own military. Ukraine's Third Army Corps has said it plans to replace roughly 30% of its infantry with ground robotic systems by the end of 2026, and other officers have called full infantry replacement an eventual goal. Hordiienko's account, shaped by his own shift from rifle-and-mortar combat to drone operations, argues against that trajectory ever completing — infantry holds ground; drones strike and surveil; neither substitutes for the other.

"Different functions of war"

Hordiienko compared infantry and drones to two halves of a single system rather than competing tools. Infantry cannot operate without supporting fire and reconnaissance, he said, and drones — while efficient at surveillance and strikes — cannot hold territory the way ground troops can. If war is still fought over front lines and captured ground, he argued, only infantry can perform that function; drones deliver cost-effective damage but do not occupy space.

He traced Ukraine's drone advantage not to hardware alone but to the system around it — production, battlefield communication, and rapid adaptation to frontline needs. Ukrainian manufacturers he named, including Skyeton, Ukrspetssystems, DeviRO, and Firepoint, built reconnaissance and strike capabilities under resource shortages that Russia's more centralized, state-linked defense industry did not face in the same way, he said.

The end of romanticized war

Hordiienko dates a turning point in how Ukrainian soldiers relate to the war to the 2023 Zaporizhzhia counteroffensive. Before it, he said, volunteers who joined in 2022 operated in an emotionally charged, maximalist mode — young men competing to reach combat before the war, as they assumed, ended quickly. After the counteroffensive stalled, he said, that gave way to a more systematic, mechanized phase he calls "a war of military machines."

He illustrated the shift with a sword-and-shield framework: each side develops a new method of attack, the other adapts a defense, and the balance resets every few months. The side that adapts and scales fastest gains the advantage, he said — a dynamic he sees as running through the drone war specifically.

Hordiienko enlisted through an unusual path. He and three other volunteers, all under 21 and already carrying combat experience from the war's opening months, could not sign standard military contracts because of their age. They were enlisted only after Ukraine's then-commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, issued a personal order on their behalf.

What newer recruits are owed

Speaking about troops mobilized later in the war — arriving without the volunteer surge's initial urgency — Hordiienko said commanders now owe recruits honesty rather than appeals to abstract duty. He described his approach as a direct exchange: a commander sets out the conditions of service, and the soldier meets specific obligations in return, with consequences if either side breaks that arrangement. Motivation, in his account, rests less on invoking "fighting for Ukraine" and more on concrete terms of service, fair treatment, and — where the national cause doesn't land for a given recruit — the practical case that military service builds expertise, particularly in drone and other technical specialties, that carries into civilian life.