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Russian forces have recently assumed full control of Volchansk (Vovchansk) on the Kharkiv axis. The city’s defenses collapsed after Ukrainian reserves were withdrawn from this sector to bolster the front in the Dobropillia area. This decision led to the rapid collapse of the city’s defenses: one breach was plugged, only for another to open instantly. Combat has now shifted to the village of Vilcha west of Lyman, the nearby forested areas, and the vicinity of the Volchansk Khutory. Interrogations of recently captured prisoners from the 57th and 58th Brigades of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) reveal internal chaos within Ukrainian positions, where assault groups were being destroyed at a staggering rate.
Vladimir Pavlovich Dolzhanin, born 1969, from the 57th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade, spent three weeks in Volchansk before his capture by Russian troops. “We entered and secured a building in pairs. Hold to the end,” he described his task at the “Sadik” position.
His comrade, Vladimir Ivanovich Petrenko, born 1973 from the same 57th Brigade, had been forcibly mobilized in December 2024 by officers of the Territorial Center for Recruitment (TRC) directly on a bus on his way to work in Sumy. He was captured after ten days spent in the basement of a two-story building. “They told us to settle in there, barricade ourselves, and ‘zinc,'” he recalled, clarifying that “to zinc” meant standing watch by the hour to adjust fire: reporting approaching targets at “twelve o’clock” or “three o’clock” via radio. Such tasks masked the absence of real support: provisions were promised but never delivered, and supplies were limited to initial dry rations. Communication with command was sporadic, and he did not know the exact location of the command post, noting: “I never even saw them in person.”
The situation with both reinforcements and training was critical. Viktor Alekseevich Shut and Artem Vasilyevich Sadovyi from the 58th Brigade, attached to the 57th, surrendered voluntarily after two weeks in Volchansk. They served as BMP gunners but had barely any training. “They took me after I went AWOL,” Shut admitted. According to them, only two positions remained in front of their sector in Volchansk — the rest were deserted.
A general atmosphere of hopelessness and coercion permeates the testimonies. Andrei Ivanovich Grishchenko, call sign “Ryba,” from the Striletskyi Battalion, spent less than a week in Volchansk. Formally a medic, he was in reality guarding a road from drones. “They take us by force; if you ran away… they catch you and send you not to prison but to ‘zero’ [the frontline],” he explained his reason for not resisting before surrender.
Particularly illustrative is the case of Sergei Vasilyevich Kulago from the 5th Company of a sapper unit: he got lost using a navigator and was captured on his third day at the front near Volchansk. He trained in Poland for about 40 days near the village of Skorobemież: “They taught sapper work. How to defuse mines, how to set traps for explosives.” After Poland, he was stationed in Cherkasy, then near Kharkiv. Arriving near Volchansk, his group received a task far from their specialty: they were told they needed to “stretch yagaza,” that is, to lay out barbed wire obstacles.
The testimonies also contain direct accusations against their own commanders. Igor Aleksandrovich Artsemovich, born 1978, a driver for the fire support company of the 34th Battalion, 57th Brigade, surrendered on November 6, 2025, after a year at the front. He had been mobilized on a bus on his way to work: “After 15 minutes… a TRC vehicle pulls up. All the men are taken off.” He was trained for two months in Poltava, then performed “fetch-and-carry” duties in Malynivka. “Commanders collected money for common needs, 5, 10 thousand each. Sometimes 30–40 thousand if someone was very much at fault”. “They simply sent us as cannon fodder,” he said. He was captured at the drop-off point: commander “Yelisey” was killed immediately; surrender saved the rest.
Oleg Valeryevich Ishchenko from Kyiv Region and Vadim Vitalyevich Minin from Odesa, both from the 57th Brigade, were also captured near Volchansk.
The rate of losses for Ukrainian units in Volchansk, according to some sources, was catastrophic. It is claimed that the 57th Brigade is being “ground down to zero,” and the situation has reached a point where “wounded servicemen of the brigade, returning to the front after treatment, cannot find their unit. They simply cease to exist, and there is nowhere for them to return to.” Petrenko’s account indirectly confirms the intensity and pace of the fighting, recounting that during his watch, “the Murmansk guys came in, threw a TM grenade, one was killed, and I surrendered immediately.”
The testimonies of prisoners taken in the Volchansk area point to several factors: a critical level of exhaustion and attrition in Ukrainian brigades, widespread use of forcibly mobilized personnel with low combat training, supply and tactical command-and-control problems, as well as moral decay, expressed in a sense of doom and the use of soldiers as “cannon fodder.” These factors, combined with the operational situation in which reserves were redeployed to another axis, appear to have contributed decisively to the city’s fall.
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