A handful of Russian soldiers fighting in eastern Ukraine have been accused of cannibalism after running low on food during the winter.
Ukrainian military intelligence officers have shared evidence to support their claim with The Sunday Times, including photographs and purported intercepts of a dozen audio transmissions between senior Russian army officers.
One Ukrainian intelligence source said they had evidence of at least five instances where Russian infantrymen were said by their fellow soldiers and commanders to have eaten their comrades.
If found to be true, these incidents were seemingly isolated and limited in number, taking place in deep winter when supply chains were difficult to maintain. There are also questions concerning the mental health of the soldiers involved, who may have been driven to extreme measures as a result of the psychological toll of the battlefield.
The new allegations come from Ukrainian intelligence services, who said their cybersecurity specialists obtained audio and picture evidence while searching for battlefield information on the messaging app Telegram. Ukraine’s military intelligence has previously published snippets of phone calls it claims are genuine interceptions of Russian communications, though The Sunday Times is not able to independently verify these. Russia regularly dismisses the content of these intercepted calls, describing them as “fake”.
The most recent incidents shared with The Sunday Times include one case where an infantryman, referred to by his call sign Khromoy, a Russian word that roughly translates to “limpy”, was caught after killing two soldiers and attempting to eat the leg of one of his victims while stationed near Myrnohrad, in the contested Donetsk region, in November 2025. Khromoy belonged to the 95th Regiment of the 5th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, 51st Guards Combined Arms Army.
Buildings damaged by Russian military strikes in the frontline town of Myrnohrad, Donetsk regionAnatolii Stepanov/Reuters
In the conversation, conducted via Telegram, an unnamed officer reported the incident to Lieutenant Razikov Vladislav Abdulkhalykovych, the deputy commander of the 5th Brigade’s reconnaissance battalion. The officer shared several images, including a graphic photo of the leg and pictures of a malnourished soldier. The Sunday Times analysed the images with specialised AI image detection software, which concluded they were not artificially generated or altered.
An independent conflict surgeon reviewed the image of the leg. They said the injuries in the photograph were unlikely to have been caused by conflict wounds, such as from an explosion. “It doesn’t look like a blast or fragment injury,” they said. “It looks like it has been cut with a sharp knife.”
In separate audio messages sent in the Telegram channel, the unnamed officer can be heard speaking to Lieutenant Abdulkhalykovych. He said there had been an “incident” in the brigade.
“In short, one ally killed two others and he tried … he cut off a leg and was already trying to eat one of them,” the unnamed officer said in a voice note, describing how Khromoy was discovered by two comrades sent to investigate his absence. “In the end, today they went and found the place where he had taken them to the basement, cut off a leg and was already, through a meat grinder or something, sitting there, turning it, trying to eat … He opened fire on them when they came to check on him. They killed him.”
The officer shared a photo of Khromoy, deceased and appearing severely underweight. He added: “I have no idea where he got that meat grinder. That’s the most interesting part.”
Abdulkhalykovych replied: “Are they not being fed or what? I don’t understand.”
The officer responded: “Ours will also soon start eating each other … All the guys are skinny. Everyone is on starvation rations.”
Two other Telegram conversations included discussion of separate cases of cannibalism. In one conversation, recovered on April 3 last year, a soldier with the call sign Most, from the 54th Motorised Rifle Regiment, complained to his commanding officer at having to share a dugout with a specific soldier while based near Bakhmut, in Donetsk. “If he were a human being, he could stay here as long as he liked, but he ate a corpse, human meat,” he said. “I am a Muslim. I don’t want someone like that coming into my shelter.”
On October 8, 2025, the unit commander of the 1437th Motorised Rifle Regiment accused one of his subordinates of cannibalism while stationed in Udachne, near Pokrovsk. “If you had said something, I would have given you a direction on where to go, where to get meat,” he said, later asking: “Why the f*** are you eating Khokhols [a derogatory term for Ukrainians] … Stop f***ing eating people.”
Russian soldiers ride on an Akatsiya self-propelled gun in eastern UkraineRussian defence ministry/AP
In a separate message that Ukrainian hackers found on Telegram, the chief of staff of the 55th Motorised Rifle Brigade wrote to a subordinate on December 11, ordering troops: “No alcohol! No drugs! No moving around without identity documents! No cannibalism!” Last year, the Ukrainian military published an expletive-laden phone call in which one soldier accused his comrade, call sign Brelok (“keychain”), of killing and eating another soldier with the call sign Foma (Thomas). “Brelok whacked him and then ate him for f***ing two weeks,” the soldier claimed.
The Embassy of the Russian Federation in London said it saw “no reason to comment” on the allegations. A spokesman said: “What you have described are fabrications supplied by Ukrainian military intelligence — an outfit whose function is the production of propaganda, not the gathering of facts.”
Claims of cannibalism during wartime are a familiar propaganda tool, designed to depict enemy combatants as sub-human.
Reports of cannabilism during wartime have also historically emerged during periods of extreme famine, most notably during the Second World War when a Nazi blockade of Leningrad lasting almost 900 days led to police arresting as many as 2,000 people for eating human flesh.
A senior Ukrainian military source said much of the fighting is taking place in urban battlefields, with few options for foraging or hunting for food, made more difficult during the particularly harsh winter just passed. The source said he was “surprised” by the allegations, adding: “Russia is an agricultural country and they have plenty of food. it is also pretty easy to transport food to the front lines with drones.
Russian troops have reportedly complained of receiving expired rations or being abandoned without basic provisions for weeks, forcing them to loot to survive. At the outset of the war, The New York Times reported that some soldiers were issued meal rations that expired in 2002.
CCTV footage published in 2023 by the SBU, Ukraine’s security agency, shows Russian soldiers looting grocery shops and private residences looking for food.
Captured Russian troops increasingly say that they are starving, according to Ukraine’s military. A project run by the Ukrainian armed forces called I Want To Live, which encourages enemy soldiers to surrender, has reported that 10,000 Russians have handed themselves over to Ukrainian custody, most of them last year.
Bradley Martin, a former US naval captain and a senior research fellow at the Rand Corporation, an American public policy think tank, said there had been reports of poor provisions of supplies, including food, to Russian infantry during the war. He was not commenting on reports of alleged cannibalism. “Many of the reports come from Ukraine reports of communications intercept, so we do have to apply some possibility of selective reporting, but the concept that logistics support for the Russian army is poor is wholly credible,” Martin said. “Troop support is not a major priority of the Russian army.”
By the end of 2025, the Russian army increased its military presence in Ukraine, increasing ground forces to around 710,000 soldiers, a significant increase on the 600,000 troops deployed at the start of the year. According to Oleksandr Syrskyi, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, Moscow has an ambition to recruit 409,000 new troops in 2026.
Vikram Mittal, a US military analyst, said the large rise in infantry numbers requires an equally large increase in supplies, which proved challenging during the particularly harsh winter. “Sustained offensive operations like the Russian invasion of Ukraine require a constant flow of supplies to the front line. The extreme weather we saw over the past winter will have placed strain on transportation networks and troop sustainment,” said Mittal.
A Russian soldier guards a Grad self-propelled multiple rocket launcher at an undisclosed location in UkraineRussian defence ministry/AP
The Ukrainian military has also been targeting Russian resupply and logistics networks using kamikaze and bomber drones, including targeting train depots and storage facilities in Crimea and Russia. Mittal said resupply vehicles are “particularly vulnerable because they generally lack armour and are constrained to predictable road networks with little cover or concealment”.