Their deaths sparked strong reactions on the social network Telegram last August. On July 28, five Russian soldiers aged 28 to 36 were killed after being ambushed by Ukrainian special forces in the Semenivsky district of Ukraine. An almost innocuous operation at a time when the war has been raging for two and a half years, except for one detail. After identifying the bodies, the Ukrainian special forces were categorical: the soldiers were none other than members of Senezh, the secret Russian elite commando that is active in Ukraine.
“Bring back a killed Ukrainian”
But what is Senezh in concrete terms? According to a Molfar investigationa private agency that works with the Ukrainian army, this Russian unit feared as much by the armed forces of kyiv as by the civilian population, would have a combat unit, a training center based in the Moscow region and several hundred soldiers. Hand-picked soldiers recruited from the army’s special forces and intelligence units. Accused by the Ukrainians of assassinating the least civilian, these recruits would follow, according to the largest OSINT agency in Ukraine, the “bloody ritual” of Senezh. “After their graduation, and once integrated into the subversive reconnaissance groups, they are supposed to enter Ukrainian territory and bring back a dead Ukrainian. If they fail to bring back a soldier, they take a civilian,” an anonymous source in the intelligence services told Molfar.
According to Russian media, the missions of the Senezh army are clear: to gather information by penetrating the front line if necessary, to carry out actions against strategic links in the military chain such as command posts, and to sabotage by destroying infrastructure and conducting special missions such as psychological operations.
Sabotage and inform
On the Ukrainian front, about sixty sabotage operations in the border regions of Chernihiv, Sucy and Kharkiv were reportedly carried out by Senezh in 2023, according to Molfar. That same year, the military unit was transferred to the Belgorod region of Russia, due to the intensification of the anti-Putin partisan movement on the territory and Ukrainian incursions. Senezh was then to carry out anti-sabotage operations and protect the border areas.
If Russia has made this elite unit the specialist in intelligence and sabotage actions during the war in Ukraine, it is because the Senezh army is not new to this. According to RFI and a study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the commando soldiers were allegedly involved in the capture of Aleppo and Palmyra in Syria in 2015, where they allegedly guided Russian air strikes in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s troops. The previous year, in 2014, this same unit allegedly contributed to securing the Sochi Winter Olympics. Missions that gradually led it to the one it is currently fulfilling: sabotage, inform and kill.