Russian Soldiers castrated in Chechenya

[Issinoho (imported)]

Does anyone know anymore about the 25 captured Russian Soldiers who were released...not before being surgically castrated, back in May 1995? Wasn't there a news video clip covering this as well?

[Uncle Flo (imported)]

I haven't heard of this incident but there have been many stories on the net of castrations on both sides of this conflict as well as in Bosnia. --FLO--

[Oleg (imported)]

There are such cases really. They were both in the Chechen Republic and in Afghanistan

[Testman (imported)]

From what I read about that, in one event, the Russians retaliated by showing up at a small village and castrating the entire male population there. Supposedly took only half a day.

[stevesd (imported)]

I don't recall any such move by the Russian Army castrating a town? I know in Afganistan and in Iraq, I was with a Army Medic who castrated RAG Heads because they did not give up Talaban Intel. The guys were spread Eagle over a chair with a whole in it, and the Medic just castrated like a VET will castrate a Dog or cat. The guys were given a shot to control some of the pain, but after 10 or so were castrated this way, they started talking.

[SunLord (imported)]

I don't recall any such move by the Russian Army castrating a town? I know in Afganistan and in Iraq, I was with a Army Medic who castrated RAG Heads because they did not give up Talaban Intel. The guys were spread Eagle over a chair with a whole in it, and the Medic just castrated like a VET will castrate a Dog or cat. The guys were given a shot to control some of the pain, but after 10 or so were castrated this way, they started talking.

unbeleivable in this day and age

[Hash (imported)]

Try this web page article:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 889310.ece

War’s a drug and I got hooked on the carnage of Chechnya

Arkady Babchenko, the author of an acclaimed memoir of his life as a Russian soldier, tells Jon Swain how combat and the brutality inflicted on him by his own side claimed his soul

He is an unlikely hero, as heroes often are. Arkady Babchenko, born in Moscow, the only son of a middle-class family, wanted to be a lawyer. But in November 1995, in his second year of law studies, he was conscripted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya.

There, as a soldier, he encountered killings, beatings, starvation and sheer terror, all the brutalities and humiliations of war. Yet a few years later, after graduating, he was irresistibly drawn back to fight a second time in the bitter conflict in the tiny republic in the north Caucasus that was trying to break away from the Russian Federation; this time he went as a volunteer soldier.

“Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world,” he says. He cannot otherwise explain why he volunteered. “Maybe because my past was there, a large part of my life. It was as if only my body had returned from that first war, but not my soul.”

In Chechnya something happened to him as he stood on the edge of humanity: the war was dehumanising but it moulded his manhood. It taught him to be a survivor and, he says, it made him a completely different person.

“When I returned from the war, my mother did not get back her son,” he says. “The Arkady Babchenko who went to war does not exist any more. I am a new man with different interests, different friends, a different outlook on life. I am not happy that the war happened in my life, but I have no regrets.”

Chechnya cost thousands of lives on both sides. Horror was everywhere. Round the main square of one village were large crosses upon which Russian soldiers had been crucified and castrated.

In retaliation Russian troops herded all the men they could find into the square, threw them down in piles and hacked at them. In half a day the whole village was castrated, then the battalion moved out.

But many of Babchenko's comrades were killed, not by their Chechen enemies but by the brutal conduct of their own Russian officer corps who starved and beat the young conscripts, suppressing everything that was human in them, destroying their personality and individuality, treating them, he says, no better than slaves.

That Babchenko, now 30, is alive at all to tell this grim tale is a constant puzzle to him. Tall and slender, with stubble on his chin, he has melancholy brown eyes that still have the stare of a man who has seen death at close hand. He suffers survivor’s guilt.

He was having coffee in Soho last week after readings at London’s South Bank Centre from his acclaimed book on the conflict, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya, and admits that while he does not miss war, without its extremes of highs and lows it has left everything else flat.