Mystery on the frontlines: what Russian soldiers found while digging a trench

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine extends beyond two years, horrific war stories dominate international media. Among these, one of the most peculiar is the 2023 incident involving soldiers digging a new trench line near the frontlines.

A simple order to dig a new trench produced an unsettling surprise for a group of Russian soldiers in April 2023. Hidden deep underneath the dirt they were digging up was something they weren't expecting.

Two soldiers were reportedly infected with anthrax and taken to a hospital exile after their unit was ordered to dig defensive trenches over what they would quickly learn was a burial site for cattle. 

“No, this is not an episode from a horror movie,” wrote the exiled mayor of Melitopol Ivan Federov, who relayed the details of the situation on his public Telegram channel at the time. 

The two soldiers were allegedly from Rosvoisk, and after their diagnosis of anthrax was confirmed, they were discharged from the hospital and taken to an unknown location. 

Federov explained that the unit that dug up the trenches over the cattle burial grounds was also forced to quarantine, adding somewhat sarcastically that even Ukraine’s land was doing its part to push the Russians out of the country.

“They definitely won't have a happy ending,” Federov added, highlighting the realities of a war that has put both nations' men in the crossfire of what had by that point in time become a geopolitical nightmare for Russia and the world. 

The Telegraph’s Joe Barnes wrote that the unit digging new defensive trenches in Zaporizhia was most likely preparing for the long-awaited Ukrainian 2023 summer counteroffensive, an offensive we now know wouldn't prove successful. 

Anthrax is a serious bacterial infection and is usually only transmitted to humans via infected animals according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Joe Barnes noted Russia was no stranger to anthrax and added that the infection was endemic to most of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century due to the communist state's farming practices. 

Anthrax is rarely transmitted from person to person according to the Mayo Clinic, but it can cause skin sores as well as vomiting, and in serious cases, it can even be fatal. 

In March 2022, The Daily Beast reported that a group of Russian troops dug a series of defensive trenches in Chornobyl’s exclusion zone and suffered acute radiation sickness. 

The troops dug their trenches in Ukraine’s extremely contaminated Red Forest and were later treated in Gomel, Belarus for the radiation sickness that they developed according to The Daily Beast. 

“The area is considered so highly toxic that not even highly specialized Chernobyl workers are allowed to enter the zone,” The Daily Beast noted about the land where the Russians had dug trenches. 

The Guardian’s Joe Bartholomew reported that a group of Russian troops who dug the series of defensive trenches in Chornobyl suffered from high doses of radiation. 

The Ukrainian state-owned power company Energoatom explained to The Guardian at the time that Russian troops dug trenches inside Chornobyl’s exclusion zone, which resulted in their exposure to high levels of radiation. 

“Not surprisingly, the occupiers received significant doses of radiation and panicked at the first sign of illness. And it showed up very quickly,” wrote Ukraine’s state power company Energoatom, which managed the nuclear disaster area prior to the invasion. 

The Ukrainian energy agency said at the time that Russian troops had dug into “the most polluted area in the entire exclusion zone,” which would explain why so many soldiers got so sick so quickly. 

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