Russian defense officials have been forced to confirm yet another fiasco after several volunteer fighters were mowed down at a training facility in Belgorod on Saturday.
The shooting, which reportedly took place at a military training ground in Soloti, left at least 11 troops who were preparing to join the war against Ukraine dead, according to Russia’s Defense Ministry. At least 15 others were wounded.
“During a firearms training session with individuals who voluntarily expressed a desire to participate in the special military operation (against Ukraine), the terrorists opened fire with small arms on the personnel of the unit,” the defense ministry said in a statement published by RIA Novosti.
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“As a result of the shooting, 11 people were fatally wounded. Another 15 people with wounds of varying severity were taken to a medical facility,” officials said.
The official version of events was almost immediately called into question by independent reporting that described a drastically different chain of events.
“Twenty two people died in front of me today. It was just crazy [people] mowing their own down on the shooting range. And it’s not clear, if someone just went nuts or if it was some kind of sabotage,” an unnamed witness told the Sota news outlet.
The source contradicted the defense ministry’s account, saying three men had actually taken part in the shooting. One of them reportedly fled as the two others were shot.
The witness described a “field of corpses” after the apparent attack, calling it “just a shit show.”
Another witness was later quoted telling Sota that troops had been practicing firing a machine gun at a target when the attackers turned the machine gun around to fire it straight into the crowd of trainees.
The Daily Beast could not immediately verify the witness accounts.
While defense officials have sought to portray the gunmen as outsiders–calling them “terrorists” who hailed from an unspecified former Soviet republic–several independent reports have described them as drafted troops who were also training at the military facility.
The training ground was said to be the same one where more than 100 drafted troops from Bryansk staged a mutiny of sorts in recent days, outright refusing to head to the frontline due to a lack of training.
Perhaps even more damning for the Kremlin, relatives of men drafted from the Bryansk region released a video appeal to Vladimir Putin on Saturday saying their sons, brothers, and husbands had been threatened and robbed at the same training facility where the shooting took place.
“The whole organization of the mobilization was wrong from the beginning… They were thrown without training into the occupied territories,” one woman said.
“It’s just a betrayal that they are going there unprepared,” she said.
The wife of one of the other men said they had been threatened by higher-ranking service members because they made clear they “don’t want to be cannon fodder.”
“What a mess!” she said.
Those killed have not yet been named by the defense ministry, but they were described by Mash as volunteer fighters from the Bryansk region.
