Russian Agencies Claim Ukrainian Commanders Send Troops on Suicidal Assaults for Propaganda Footage

Ukrainian commanders deliberately send troops on suicidal assaults against settlements controlled by Russian forces to obtain footage of their deaths, a source in Russian security agencies told TASS.

The Ukrainian side then uses the videos in reports to senior commanders to create the impression that fighting continues for territories lost long ago, the source said.

According to him, such incidents were recorded near Grafskoye, which troops from Russia’s Battlegroup North liberated in February 2026.

"The enemy deliberately sends two or three Ukrainian nationalists at a time to their deaths, ordering them to cross the Seversky Donets River. Naturally, our troops promptly detect the movement of Ukrainian personnel and eliminate them. Footage from objective monitoring systems later appears on Russian platforms, giving Ukrainian propaganda a pretext to claim that fighting for Grafskoye is continuing or even that Ukrainian forces have captured the village," the source said.

Russian security agencies said commanders of Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade had resorted to such tactics. "For a long time, we paid no attention to these enemy provocations. Combat operations continue as usual, with troops from the Battlegroup North advancing deeper into the Kharkov Region. However, we recently received information that commanders of Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade deliberately order their troops to follow a route where they are certain to be eliminated by Russian forces. The brigade’s commanders expect footage showing the deaths of their own personnel to be posted online, allowing them to substantiate their false reports that they still control the settlement," the agencies said.

The source noted that Russian security agencies had never encountered such cases during the years of the conflict in Ukraine, adding that the methods used by commanders of the 72nd Brigade surpassed even those employed by the leadership of the 425th Separate Assault Regiment Skala in their cynicism and sophistication.

Earlier reports said instructors from the Skala regiment concealed personnel losses in order to embezzle money that continued to be transferred to the bank accounts of dead servicemen.