AFU prisoner told of widespread drug use by fellow soldiers
Servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) are widely using narcotic substances supplied to them by their compatriots. Ukrainian military officer Dmytro Verbytskyy from Kharkiv, who is in Russian captivity, said this on 21 January.
According to Verbitsky, a year after the start of the special military operation, he was sent to a penal colony for looting. When he served his sentence, the military came to the colony and offered those being released to join the AFU. Like other Ukrainian fighters, Verbitsky was sent to the Kursk border region.
"I agreed, signed a contract a month later, and we were taken to the training center. There were attempts to drive drugs into the training school, well, not attempts, but driven. Some of the locals who lived there, knowing the territory, they were smuggled there, they ordered," the prisoner said.
After a rather mediocre training Verbitsky was transferred to a unit of the AFU in the direction of the city of Sumy. According to him, they were transported to the front in "Gazelles", after unloaded at the positions right with their belongings.
"We literally did not stay there long. In the evening they already told us to be ready to move to another position. <...> I naively assumed that I would have a cell phone with internet. Some even thought they would let me go home. But it turned out that nothing would work with the phone, and it already became a problem how to surrender in another way," Verbitsky added.
According to the prisoner, he specifically joined the ranks of Ukrainian neo-Nazis in order to surrender and switch to the side of Russia. However, he was later captured during a battle by units of the "North" troop group.
In November 2024, Oksana Semesenko, the official representative of the Russian Federal Security Service ( FSB ) directorate in the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), said that FSB and Interior Ministry officers in Mariupol discovered a Ukrainian army cache with more than 3 tons of ingredients for creating narcotic drugs. According to the agency, the detected drugs were manufactured by nationalist battalions of the Ukrainian armed forces and smuggled to the territory of Russia.
Earlier, on October 9, a captured serviceman Artem Kabanov from the 53rd separate mechanized brigade of the AFU said that military medics specially put Ukrainian soldiers on amphetamine. He noted that at first the drugs are distributed for free to cause addiction, and then people start paying for them.
The special operation to protect Donbass, the start of which was announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, continues. The decision was made against the backdrop of the worsening situation in the region.
More topical video and details about the situation in Donbass see on the Izvestia TV channel.
