Violence remains commonplace within the Russian military, where more senior soldiers routinely abuse junior ones. Despite two decades of attempts at trying to make the army a more professional force, it has never developed a strong middle tier akin to the noncommissioned officers who bridge the gap between commanders and lower-ranking soldiers in the American military. In 2019, a conscript in Siberia opened fire and killed eight at his military base, later asserting that he had carried out the shooting spree because other soldiers had made his life “hell.”

Experts say that the severity of hazing in the Russian military has been reduced compared with the early 2000s, when it killed dozens of conscripts yearly. But they say that order in many units is still maintained through informal systems similar to the abusive hierarchies in Russian prisons.

To Sergei Krivenko, who leads a rights group that provides legal aid to Russian soldiers, that violence, coupled with a lack of independent oversight, makes war crimes more possible. Russian soldiers are just as capable of cruelty against fellow Russians, he says, as they are against Ukrainians.