Russian soldiers who refuse to fight in Ukraine are being held captive in 'torture pits', it has been claimed.
Contracted troops who request to leave the front are reportedly being sent into custody in Moscow-held areas of the Luhansk oblast before being shipped back out into the war.
It is understood soldiers were promised leave after three months service and the opportunity to opt to be removed from the war completely.
But the agreement was allegedly reneged upon when some soldiers submitted refusal letters and they were instead arrested and taken to the city of Bryanka.
According to reports, they were held in horrendous conditions with eye witness accounts referring to "pits of some kind" and "torture".
The father of one of the soldiers arrested told The Insider that they have been held for over a month.
He believes the captors are Moscow-backed militants and understands the conditions in the 'prison' are terrible.
"Some pits, torture and the like. This is what the people who come from there say.
At the same time, the man noted that the soldiers did not want to return to the front.
"They no longer want to be up to their necks in the blood of their friends and close officers," he explained.
The dad said his son signed the contract before the start of the war.
After that an order came in for a 'special operation' but they were told they wouldn't be involved in hostilities as they hadn't had any combat training, he claimed.
It is understood at least 234 Russian soldiers from different military units are being held in Luhansk, with many in basements and garages.
The man's son and his colleagues from the Sakhalin military unit submitted their refusals to participate on July 8.
He then told his dad he had been summoned to meet with a general before being taken to a basement and forced to work unloading warehouses.
The soldier reportedly said the 'Refuseniks' are being given the choice to return to their unit or go to another, but they have to return to the front.
The man said his son stopped communicating on July 19.
It comes as Ukraine has forged ahead on Monday with efforts to restart grain exports from its Black Sea ports under a deal aimed at easing global food shortages but said a weekend missile strike by Russian forces on Odesa underlined the risks to deliveries.
As the war entered its sixth month, the Ukrainian military reported widespread Russian shelling in eastern Ukraine overnight and said Moscow continued to prepare for an assault on Bakhmut in the industrial Donbas region, which Moscow aims to seize on behalf of separatist proxies.
Near Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city located in the country's northeast, three people were trapped under the rubble of a cultural centre in the town of Chuhuyiv and a fourth person was wounded, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's office said.
Zelensky denounced Saturday's attack on Odesa port as "barbarism" that showed Moscow could not be trusted to implement the deal struck a day earlier with Turkish and United Nations mediation.
