1/ Russian soldiers are telling their relatives that they are being forcibly tattooed on their chests with "death numbers" – their military ID numbers – before going on assault missions, presumably to make their bodies more easily identifiable if and when they are recovered. ⬇️
2/ Multiple accounts from Russian soldiers and their relatives say that their commanders are forcing them to have their chests tattooed with information from their military identification tags. 3/ This appears to be a new practice implemented since around the midsummer of 2026. It's possibly associated with assault units, which have a particularly high likelihood of death for their participants. 4/ In July 2026, the sister of a mentally disabled man, Sergei Dmitrievich Chernykh, published a video complaining about his treatment after he was made to join the army in unclear circumstances. 5/ "Nobody knows what unit he's in. He doesn't understand. He doesn't even understand where he is. He doesn't know how he got there. His memory is bad. His legs are numb; they can't walk." 6/ Sergei told his sister Tatyana that he had been forcibly tattooed on his chest with his identification number, "after which they announced plans to send him to the Zaporizhzhia front as part of an assault unit." 7/ A similar account was given by the mother of a missing soldier, Vladislav Aleksandrovich Gladkov. She advises viewers: "If you or your soldiers are suddenly forced to get a tattoo, know that they may not return." 8/ His mother Ekaterina says that her son was forced to have his dog tag number tattooed on his body immediately before leaving for a combat mission in April, after which he went missing. 9/ She fears that such tattoos may be connected to the preparation of soldiers for death: "They forced him to get a tattoo of a dog tag on his chest, after which my son went off the grid." 10/ Anastasia from Taganrog has described the experiences of her father, an artilleryman who was transferred to an assault unit. She says her father showed her a tattoo of his badge number on his chest and told her: “I now have a tattoo – and it shows me the ‘death number’”. 11/ He said that of the approximately 200 men who were at the training ground with him, only a handful were still in action, highlighting the very heavy losses being sustained by the Russians. His drunken commander shot at their feet to 'motivate' them. 12/ Interestingly, she also said that her husband was being ordered to snatch homeless people from the streets in Krasnodar to recruit them into the army, as part of an apparent drive to replenish depleted unit rosters: 13/ “Now I know how they find contract soldiers who go on assaults, fuck. This is fucked up. They're recruiting homeless people from the streets ... And he went on a business trip to Krasnodar. They told him... Yes, they told him: go look for people on the streets." /end Sources: 🔹 t.me 🔹 t.me 🔹 t.me Addendum: reportedly one such tattoo