US veteran in Ukraine said that he'd pile Russian bodies up like sandbags after taking trenches in scenes that reminded him of World War I

• A US veteran who fought in Ukraine described the intense, close-quarters trench warfare there.
• He said that sometimes when they took a trench they would pile Russian bodies outside like sandbags.
• Other soldiers said they slept on top of Russian bodies as it was too dangerous to remove them.

A US veteran who fought in Ukraine said that after taking trenches from the Russians, he and his comrades would pile up the bodies of the dead troops outside like sandbags for added defense and to keep the rats out.

The former soldier, who spoke to Business Insider on the condition of anonymity about his experiences fighting against Russia's invasion, said that after capturing a trench from Russian soldiers, "we would take the Russian bodies that were inside the trenches with us and then we put them on the opposite side of the trench that's facing the new Russian positions. "

"Like fucking sandbags basically is what we'd use them for."

The veteran began fighting in Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, and he left the country last December after engaging in combat in some of the war's most intense areas, like Kharkiv and Bakhmut.

He said they would always remove Russian bodies from the trenches because "we wouldn't want them in the trench just because that allows more rats and decay."

"We'd kind of just nudge them out a little as far as we can while staying inside the trenches."

That hasn't necessarily been the case across the front, though. He pointed to reports that Ukrainian soldiers who took Russian trenches had to sit and sleep on body bags with dead Russian soldiers inside of them because the situation made it too dangerous to remove them.

He said that "luckily" that didn't happen to him.

Some soldiers have said that the concentration of weaponry and intensity of the fight around them did, at times, make it too difficult to remove Russian bodies, as coming out of the trench would be a risky move that could leave a soldier among the fallen.

A Ukrainian soldier, Oleksandr Yabchanka, previously described to BI his experiences holed up in a dugout that had dead Russian soldiers inside it. The Ukrainians were unable to lift the corpses out because of the constant artillery fire and could only push the bodies to the dugout's edge and bury them under some dirt, he said.

Trenches like World War I

Trench warfare has become a defining feature of the war between Russia and Ukraine, with both sides building vast networks of trenches to hide in and launch attacks from.

The veteran BI spoke with said that he found fighting in them "weird as shit, man, because I never thought that we would go back to trench warfare. And, the next thing I know, I feel like I'm fighting in World War I."

In that war, trenches ran across Europe. Troops inside battled rats, injuries, diseases, and relentless artillery fire. And outside, they faced unforgiving machine-gun fire in assaults across the space in between trenches called "No Man's Land." In WWI, battles sometimes left hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead.

Other soldiers and foreign veterans in Ukraine, as well as warfare experts, have also compared elements of this conflict to World War I, due to the slow, grinding nature of the conflict, the proliferation of trenches, the high death toll, and the heavy use of artillery.

Another American veteran, with the call sign Jackie, previously told BI that fighting in the eastern city of Bakhmut looked "like World War I." The devastation and death in that broken city led soldiers on both sides to refer to the fighting there as the "meat grinder." Tens of thousands of troops are believed to have been killed in Bakhmut.

An ambulance driver in Ukraine compared that fight to the 1916 Battle of Verdun, the longest battle of WWI, in an interview with France24.

The veteran who shared his experiences with BI said that most of his fighting took place outside of trenches, compared to other units, which were much more trench-based. But he's had brutal experiences in them.

"There's been a few times where we're sitting in a trench," and there's "artillery shells just dropping around you for hours on end."

Then, at some point, you look up, and the enemy's on you. "You see fucking a dozen or more Russians bum-rushing your trench, and then you got to go to work," he said.

In the trenches, fighting was extremely close quarters. He said he fought in Iraq as a contractor before experiencing Ukraine's trench warfare. "It's very real," he said. "And it's very close, and honestly, it's more intense than fucking anything else I've ever been through."

As he was carrying out assault operations, the veteran said that he never had to sit in trenches for days on end as many others fighting for Ukraine have had to. "Thank God for that," he said.

He described assaulting trenches as extremely dangerous, saying that there wasn't a "single trench raiding mission where we didn't take multiple casualties." He said that when Ukraine is assaulting, Russia has a defensive, home-field advantage.

"You're trying to work your way through a trench that you've never been in before," the veteran said, explaining that "you're basically trying to take the home of another individual who's lived there for days, weeks, months at this point."

"They know every nook and cranny. They know every turn," he said.

He said the experience could vary wildly depending on what training and enthusiasm the Russian soldiers he encountered had.

"I've jumped in the trenches where the Russians give up immediately, like, 'Oh, fuck this shit.' Or they try running away immediately," he said. "Other times, you're literally fighting for every square inch that you go through. They do not want to give it up."