A Deadly Graduation: One in Four Cadets Killed in War

Two months after the beginning of the war, on April 24, 2022, solemn marches echoed over the parade ground of the Donetsk Higher Combined Arms Command School (DonVOKU). 49 cadets were graduating early.

“In this difficult time of war, [they] could not stay away and expressed their desire to pass their graduation exams early and go to defend their homeland from the Ukrainian occupiers,” explained the author of a reportage released by the press service of the People’s Militia of the DPR (as the local armed forces are called). “The then head of the school, General Mikhail Tikhonov, assured: “They are fully prepared. They are coming to serve their homeland, to do their duty.”

In just a couple of weeks, the former cadets will be attacking Ukrainian positions in the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. Another 25 newly minted lieutenants graduated from the school on time — on July 1. And after graduation they also went to the front. 

The graduation of 2022 is the third in the modern history of the school. DonVOKU was established back in the Soviet times in 1967, closed in 1995, and in 2015 it was reopened by the then head of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DPR) Alexander Zakharchenko. It is the only higher military educational institution in Donbas. 

By November 2024, 17 cadets of this first military graduation had died — it turns out, almost every fourth. In total, 29 graduates of the school are known to have died. From 2020 to 2024, 294 officers graduated from it — that is, every tenth of them is killed now.

Conscripts from the territories of the “DPR” and “LPR” have been in a more vulnerable position than Russian soldiers since the beginning of the war, says military expert Pavel Luzin: “From the very beginning, the Russian command perceived the Donetsk and Luhansk men as a second class, which was used up earlier and without regret.”

Forced mobilization in Donbas began a week before the full-scale invasion. All men from 18 to 55 were forbidden to leave the self-proclaimed republics, mass detentions took place throughout Donbas, and businesses were obliged to mobilize half of their draft-age employees. Military equipment was poor, and those mobilized were thrown into hot spots without training.

“They were distributed in the units even before they got their diplomas”

Igor Buriansky decided to go to war while still at school. In 2014, when war broke out in eastern Ukraine, his family lived in the town of Snezhnoye, Donetsk Oblast. Buriansky was finishing ninth grade. Snezhnoye was under the control of separatists, there was fierce fighting, and the city was shelled.

“Our factory was shelled, then our house was blown up. The military would come, fire back, and leave, while we stayed behind waiting for the ‘response’,” his mother Svetlana recalls in a conversation with IStories.

In 2017, when he turned 18, Igor decided to become a volunteer. “I tried to dissuade him. Then he learned about DonVOKU somewhere and said: ‘You don’t let me go to war — I’ll go to study at a military school.’ I agreed to that,” Svetlana says. 

Almost all the cadets of the 2022 graduating class were born in Donbas in 1999-2000. “They were distributed in the units even before they got their diplomas,” says an employee of the DonVOKU. “And immediately after graduation — to the front.” 

The cadets were trained for a week at the firing range. According to obituaries, after graduation lieutenants were assigned to various units, from infantry to tanks, including platoon commanders. More than half of the officers killed died in the first year of the war in the assaults in the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts.

One of the first, on May 17, three weeks after graduation, graduate Alexei Zyatkov was killed in an ambush near Rubizhne. A week later, on May 25, Igor Buriansky was killed by a bullet there, and posthumously he was awarded the Order of Service and Bravery of the II degree.

Danil Abashidze is another early graduate of the class of 2022. He was born and raised in the village of Zaitseve, Donetsk Oblast. In 2014, the contact line ran directly through the village and remained fixed there for eight years. To this day, the front line is just a couple of kilometers away from the village.

Almost immediately after the start of hostilities, a shell destroyed the school where Danil went, and he was transferred to a neighboring village. According to his mother Marina, at that time young people supported the hostilities against Ukraine: “Many of our guys joined the militia, as it was called then.”

Danil learned about DonVOKU from the officers of the school, who came to the school, and decided to enroll. His mother was against it, but the class teacher changed her mind: “Do not discourage, do not be against, this is his choice, his decision. If they are so determined, let them go. This is higher education, he will be an officer.” 

In the third year, the cadet himself began to doubt his choice. By that time, the prestige of the military in Donbas had noticeably fallen. “People were tired [of the war]. When they saw a man in military uniform, they reacted negatively. Because that’s it, they’re fed up, they’re sick of it all,” Marina recalls.

However, she dissuaded her son from leaving the school. “And what will you do next? — she said to Danil. — Look at our situation. Enterprises are closed, there is no work. Where to go? Well, that’s how he managed to finish [the school] that way.”

After February 2022 Abashidze began to rush to the front. His mother was alarmed. “I said: ‘Son, they seem to begin the negotiations, soon everything will be fine.’ And he, you know, the impression was that he was worried: ‘I won’t have time to graduate, I won’t have time.’ After all, they had this, the guys — to go to war,” she said. 

Danil was glad that he had time to graduate from the school. "Because I would have been in this war in any case. I would have gone on mobilization or volunteered," Marina reports his words. 

In early October 2023, Russia launched an offensive on Avdeevka. On October 29, Abashidze’s tank was shot at. “The driver-mechanic managed to jump out, and their hatches were jammed shut. And they stayed there. As the commander told us later, the vehicle was burning for 17 hours, and then the ammunition detonated, and there was nothing left,” the mother recalls. 

Abashidze was long refused official recognition as deceased — it was only achieved this year through a court ruling. The urn with Abashidze’s ashes (“ashes from the vehicle,” as his mother says) was buried on October 29, 2024, a year after his death. 

“In our region now, probably, no matter who you point your finger at, everyone has been in direct contact with some kind of loss. If no one is killed, there are always wounded,” Marina says. “This is so commonplace here, so people are used to it. And it’s just scary and creepy, and it makes your hair stand on end.”

“Almost all of them are wounded”

“How many of the graduates are ‘300’ [wounded], I won’t even answer — almost all of them. Contusions, injuries,” an employee of the DonVOKU told IStories. 

Some of the graduates, having been wounded, tried to avoid returning to the army, said 2022 graduate Alexander Novikov in the TV program Solovyov Live: someone quit, someone transferred to the rear, “someone went AWOL.” 

“Of course, after the wounds, it is all justified, but in many ways people were disappointed. Although it all had to be like this. I don’t see what there is to be disappointed about. As if they did not know that there would be losses, that there would be injuries,” he said. Novikov himself lost a leg in the war and now works at the staff office. 

Sergei Solovyov is another DonVOKU 2022 graduate. He is a local, grew up in the Proletarskyi district of Donetsk. Since childhood, he was passionate about hand-to-hand combat and had a natural inclination “toward everything military,” he recalls. In April, on the day of his graduation from the school, he proposed to his girlfriend. By May, he was taking part in assaults near Avdeevka; during his second combat mission, he came under fire and suffered a severe contusion.

"The artillery keeps working, working. And we’re just sitting in the trenches. It got really intense," Solovyov recalls. "Then [a shell] hit. I blacked out for about ten seconds. When I came to, I saw my arms and legs were still there, but I couldn’t move them at all. My legs started twitching, and my arms were just crossed over my chest like this."

Solovyov managed to get up and run to the distant dugouts. "Snipers — one ‘200’ [killed] and one ‘300’ [wounded]. ATGM — two ‘200s.’ AGS crew — all three ‘200s,’” he lists grimly. Nearly half the platoon was killed, and “many” others were wounded.

Solovyov spent two weeks in the hospital before being discharged and sent back to the front line.

At the end of the year near Lisichansk he again received a contusion. When his platoon arrived at the position, there were already many dead and wounded, Solovyov recalls. The arriving soldiers began to dig in the frozen ground, but the shelling began. The battlefield was chaotic, Solovyov said. There were many wounded, and the motorized truck that was supposed to evacuate the soldiers was hit on the way up, the IFV too. The soldiers tried to carry each other on stretchers, but fell to the ground with wounds. 

Solovyov lost consciousness during the shelling and woke up in the rear — he was evacuated. He was sent to a hospital and subsequently discharged from military service.

Now he spends a lot of time at home: “The contusion somehow affected his head, so to speak. Now my mother and wife complain about me: sometimes I talk wrong somehow or something else.”

If not for the injuries, Solovyov would have returned to the front. “I am now discharged and often go to Rostov. And people there live their lives. Do you understand? At night, you can go out [on the street] at 1 am. So life goes on, everything is good,” he explains why he wants to return to the war. “But my childhood was taken away from me, I was 14 years old in 2014. That is, I didn’t have this teenage period. You’re sitting in the basement, you’re preparing to sit in the basement. [I want it] to be over, and that’s it.”

All for the sake of the offensive

Since 2022, about five thousand Russian officers have been killed, military expert Pavel Luzin said: “Russian troops are dying in whole platoons and companies, and officers are dying with them.” The losses among officers cited by Luzin are considered by the Czech OSINT project Killed in Ukraine.

Losses among officers are “significant,” Kateryna Stepanenko, an analyst at the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), told IStories. She said it is common practice for the Russian armed forces in Ukraine to deploy officers and other military specialists in assaults: all to keep the offensive tempo high. Such losses among officers lead to increased casualties among ordinary soldiers as well, Stepanenko says: “Officers in the Russian army are among the few military personnel who are taught to interact with other branches of the military, such as artillery.”

From the point of view of military resource management, such losses cannot be called normal, says military expert Yan Matveev. The government spends up to 5 years training commanders, and many of them die in the first weeks after they arrive at the front. However, Matveev agrees, in terms of how the Russian army has fought in the past 3 years, this is a normal situation.

For Russia, the priority is capturing territory, often at any cost, he says: “Assault groups don’t necessarily require officers. If one is present, they go with him. If not, they go without.”