Aleksandr Mokin had lost the will to live.

Convicted of selling drugs and ostracized by his family, he endured abuse from guards and frequent spells in solitary confinement at a high-security Russian prison. He told a friend he felt alone and racked with guilt.

Then, in the summer of 2022, Mr. Mokin and other inmates in Penal Colony No. 6 in the Chelyabinsk region started hearing rumors. One of Russia’s most powerful men was reportedly touring jails and offering pardons for prisoners who survived six months of fighting in Ukraine.

And by October of last year, there he was, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, standing before them in his military fatigues, himself an ex-con who now ran a private military company, Wagner. He offered freedom and money, even as he warned that the price for many would be death. Mr. Mokin and 196 other inmates enlisted the same day.

“I really wish to be there, knowing that this is likely to be a journey without return,” Mr. Mokin, then 35 and serving an 11-year sentence, told a friend in a text message that was viewed by The New York Times.

Two months later, Mr. Mokin was dead. A social media post showing his grave is the only known public tribute to his short life.

As the war in Ukraine grinds to a stalemate, Mr. Mokin’s ultimate legacy may be his small role in a much bigger, globally significant enterprise: He was one of tens of thousands of convicts powering the Kremlin’s war machine. Even now, with Mr. Prigozhin dead and Wagner disbanded, Russian inmates are still enlisting in what has become the largest military prison recruitment program since World War II.

In Ukraine, these former inmates have been used mostly as cannon fodder. But they have bolstered the ranks of Russia’s forces, helping President Vladimir V. Putin postpone a new round of mobilization, which would be an unpopular measure domestically. And since many of the inmates come from poor families and rural areas, it has helped Mr. Putin to maintain the veneer of normalcy among well-off Russians in major cities.

“When civilians are mobilized, they are ripped from their families, their jobs,” Aleksandr, one of the surviving recruits from the prison, known as IK6, said in an interview. “As for us, we’ve got nothing to lose.”

Some of the inmates’s reasons for choosing the war were obvious. Many said they were driven by patriotism, a desire to escape prison or a craving for action after years of confinement.

Yet interviews with the fighters and their relatives also revealed a deeper longing for redemption, a powerful emotional force in a country that has long wrestled with the meaning of guilt and sacrifice. For men stuck in the savage, dehumanizing conditions of Russian prisons, the war offered a chance to regain their sense of self-worth, even if it meant potentially taking other lives.

Enlisting has allowed inmates to provide income for families they had burdened for years — and to regain respect in a society that stigmatizes criminal records and honors military service.

The Times obtained the names and details of the 197 initial IK6 recruits, and was able to confirm the fates of 172 of them through 2023. Times reporters interviewed 16 of them, spoke with the families and friends of others, and reviewed social media, court records and a database of war casualties compiled by an independent news outlet, Mediazona.

Together, they form the most comprehensive portrait yet of the convicts who played an outsize role in Russia’s invasion.

The harshest finding was the one Mr. Prigozhin warned of: death. At least one in four recruits who left jail with Mr. Mokin in October 2022 was killed. Most who lived appear to have suffered serious injuries, according to interviews with survivors and relatives.

Russia’s prison service and defense ministry did not respond to questions for this article.

The data shows that the recruits averaged 33 years of age and came mostly from small towns and villages. Their most common crime was selling drugs. They had, on average, five more years left on their sentences in abusive prison conditions, providing an incentive to enlist.

Some men, however, signed up with as little as three months left behind bars, suggesting other motivations than freedom.

Nikolai, a construction worker who was convicted along with his wife for selling drugs, said he joined Wagner out of patriotism. Money also helped. Even if he died, he said, the compensation Wagner promised his family — about $50,000 — would solve their housing problems. “This is wonderful, I thought.”

Even death would have meaning, if he were killed in battle. “I didn’t want to be such a bad person in the eyes of the children in our village,” he said. “I would be remembered not as a convict, but as a man who died in a war.”

‘Human Conveyor’

In some ways, Mr. Putin’s war has turned the country’s entire criminal justice system into a military recruitment tool, experts say. Russia’s extremely high conviction rates — 99.6 percent — its long prison terms, and inhumane conditions inside jails create strong incentives to risk death to obtain freedom.

Wagner said that about 50,000 inmates served in their ranks in Ukraine, and that one in five of them died. Mr. Prigozhin himself died in a plane crash in August, in what Western intelligence agencies have called an assassination, after a failed mutiny against Russia’s military command.

The Russian Army took over Wagner’s prison recruitment program in February, not only maintaining operations but expanding them.

This year, for example, the armed forces began recruiting from pretrial detention centers and immigration detention facilities, according to three Russian prison rights groups. The military has also stepped up efforts to entice Wagner’s inmate veterans back into the war.

Yana Gelmel, an exiled Russian prison rights activist who provided documents, called the system a “human conveyor” for the war effort.

“It suits the state to continue taking these men, because they don’t exist in the eyes of society,” she said.

Located outside the industrial city of Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains, IK6 is a sprawling walled complex of barracks and workshops. It primarily holds inmates who have been convicted on first-time offenses considered “grave” under Russian law. The range of crimes is wide: from violent murders to drug sales and robberies.

“Mostly, it was people who have slipped for the first time, but have slipped pretty hard,” said Yevgeny, an inmate who lost the use of his arm in Ukraine. “Those who have killed while drunk, young drug dealers.” Like other former prisoners, he asked to be identified by only his first name to avoid retribution.

Some recruits had sold illegal substances to bolster meager wages, a review of prison sentences and interviews show. One recruit got six years for growing marijuana and trying to sell 40 grams.

But one of three recruits was serving time for murder. This rate is more than 30 times higher than the overall percentage of murder convicts in the Russian prison system, underscoring the attraction of military service to men with long sentences.

One recruit beat his drinking companion to death with a bat, then set fire to the apartment with the victim in it. Another murdered two men with an ax following a drinking session.

Among the convicted murderers who enlisted is a veteran who asked to be identified by his military call sign, Volk, meaning Wolf.

He said his mother died when he was 6 and that he grew up in foster homes and orphanages. He was imprisoned at 20, after he and another man beat two people to death while drinking, court records show. He was eager to seize Mr. Prigozhin’s offer.

“I got tired of imprisonment, realized that this is not my place,” Volk said after returning from Ukraine. “I understood, took responsibility for what I have done.”

He said he now works as a welder and studies management.

The Prison

Mr. Mokin, the convicted drug seller, had struggled to adjust to life in a prison system that has long been plagued by corruption and abuse.

He told a friend he was constantly bullied by the guards, who punished him with solitary confinement for the smallest infractions. He lacked money to buy basic necessities like toothpaste and underwear, or enjoy small luxuries like cigarettes.

Above all, he said, he was haunted by the shame of relapsing into addiction and the guilt he felt over the death by suicide of a young woman he felt close to.

“I can’t wait till they finally get to us,” he wrote his friend, referring to Wagner recruiters.

His experience appears typical of inmates who struggle to fit into the brutal caste system of many Russian jails. Enforced by underworld leaders known as bratva, the system ostracizes and humiliates inmates deemed to have violated complex social rules that govern Russian criminal life.

Inmates in the bottom rungs are forced to act as servants, carry out demeaning tasks such as cleaning toilets, and can be subjected to sexual abuse. Drug dealers like Mr. Mokin are traditionally assigned low social status.

“All you need to make sure that people keep enlisting is to create bad conditions” in prison, said Anna Karetnikova, a former senior prison official in the Moscow region, who left Russia in protest of the war. “This is not patriotism. It’s survival.”

Reducing the abuse requires paying guards and their surrogates among the inmates, in a system where the authorities relentlessly pursue financial gain, said Nikolai Shchur, a former prison ombudsman for the Chelyabinsk region who has studied the facility extensively.

Virtually any good or service at the prison is available for a price: a family visit, a positive parole letter, drugs, the use of a washing machine. The money is usually transferred by families directly into the accounts of guards or their middlemen.

During the day, about half of the inmates produce goods in a textile or scrap metal shop for about $4 worth of monthly wages. At night, inmates are enticed to participate in marathon card games and incur debts, with the payoffs eventually trickling to overseers.

Until a decade ago, IK6 authorities collected money through violence, according to Mr. Shchur and four former inmates who served sentences there at the time.

They said guards subjected an inmate on arrival to systematic torture called a “break-in” period. Methods included brutal beatings and tying a car alarm to each of the inmate’s ears, according to an official report compiled by Mr. Shchur and confirmed by the former inmates.

The violence eventually backfired. In 2012, the inmates staged one of the largest prison mutinies in modern Russian history, a peaceful rooftop sit-in that was violently repressed by the police days later.

An ensuing scandal led to the appointment of new prison officials, who outsourced the jail’s management to the underworld leaders in return for a share of the money being extorted, according to Mr. Shchur and the former inmates.

Today, the bratva enforce obedience primarily by controlling inmates’ social status. Yet, under their rule, inmates remain dependent on the financial support of family, a burden that appears to have motivated some to enlist.

“He said that he was to blame for winding up in prison, for abandoning his family,” said the former wife of a deceased recruit, Andrei Vorobei. “He didn’t care where he died, in Ukraine or in IK6.”

A Prison at War: The Convicts Sustaining Putin’s Invasion – The New York Times

A Costly Second Chance

In late April, a chartered Russian transport plane carrying about 140 former IK6 inmates landed at a military airfield outside Chelyabinsk, according to interviews and social media posts. It was the last day of their six-month contract, and they had survived.

“At first, it was difficult to comprehend that I got so lucky that I had returned,” said Nikolai, the former construction worker. “It is a feeling of madness bordering on joy.”

Most of the interviewed survivors claimed they have found respect after years of shame. One fighter, Sergei, said that on returning to his village, he changed into new fatigues, pinned on the six medals he had received, and knocked on his family’s door, where his crying mother and flabbergasted father greeted him.

“Their view of me has changed, because now everyone in the village respects them,” he said. “Their son brought back medals from the war.”

Another recruit, Aleksandr, spoke with pride about reconnecting with his estranged daughter. “She was telling everyone at school, ‘papa is at war, papa is at war,’” he said.

A few of the survivors have found factory work, and are trying to move on from prison and war. They said they are grateful to Wagner for honoring the contract terms, and to Mr. Putin for issuing pardons.

“Uncle Vova has pardoned me, forgave me and my brothers,” said a veteran, Andrei, who now works at a textile plant, using an informal version of Mr. Putin’s first name. “He gave us a second chance.”

None of those interviewed questioned the Kremlin’s decision to invade, or its rationale for war. Nor did they reflect on the atrocities and devastation Russian forces have inflicted across Ukraine in almost two years of fighting, including the deaths of thousands of civilians.

Since returning home last spring, some of the former inmates have slipped back into crime, reflecting the difficulties faced by Russians with criminal records. Of the 120 confirmed surviving IK6 recruits, nine have been charged with driving drunk, drug offenses or fraud, court records show.

Other survivors have struggled to find meaning in the decision they made, or to deal with the trauma of war.

Most of those interviewed declined to discuss details of their military service, but they have described the general brutality of the fighting. None explicitly denied Wagner’s draconian disciplinary measures, which reportedly involved the execution of fighters accused of cowardice or insubordination.

Nikolai, the former construction worker, said his initial patriotism soon clashed with what he described as incompetence and corruption among senior military officials, which increased casualties. “Our guys are out there fighting,” he said, “and these political figures are waving their little flags and moving figurines on the maps.”

Image

Whether they survived or not, soldiers said, depended on what unit they were in, who the commanders were, and whether they respected human life.

For Sergei, the medals that reconnected him to his parents have come at a psychological price.

“There’s no sleep. Only alcohol helps,” he said. “You must understand: We walked on intestines,” he added, referring to the shredded bodies on the battlefield.

Those with severe injuries described a bleak experience. An inmate named Dmitri, who lost the use of his legs, recounted how, during a commercial flight home from a military hospital, passengers who purchased priority seating refused to make space for his wheelchair.

“My mother told them that I’m coming back from the special military operation,” he said. “They couldn’t care less.”

He has rarely left home since returning, because his mother is unable to lower his wheelchair to the street.

Yevgeny, a veteran with an injured arm, recounted his typical day in a text message: “I got up. I took my pills, put on my prothesis, put on the compression sock. I prepared breakfast, ate. Took more pills,” he said. “That’s it. Two hours had passed.”

“We were told that the Motherland is in danger, we went to defend it,” he said. “But afterward, no one cares what happens to us.”

Christiaan Triebert contributed research.

Aleksandr Mokin had lost the will to live.

Convicted of selling drugs and ostracized by his family, he endured abuse from guards and frequent spells in solitary confinement at a high-security Russian prison. He told a friend he felt alone and racked with guilt.

Then, in the summer of 2022, Mr. Mokin and other inmates in Penal Colony No. 6 in the Chelyabinsk region started hearing rumors. One of Russia’s most powerful men was reportedly touring jails and offering pardons for prisoners who survived six months of fighting in Ukraine.

And by October of last year, there he was, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, standing before them in his military fatigues, himself an ex-con who now ran a private military company, Wagner. He offered freedom and money, even as he warned that the price for many would be death. Mr. Mokin and 196 other inmates enlisted the same day.

“I really wish to be there, knowing that this is likely to be a journey without return,” Mr. Mokin, then 35 and serving an 11-year sentence, told a friend in a text message that was viewed by The New York Times.

Two months later, Mr. Mokin was dead. A social media post showing his grave is the only known public tribute to his short life.

As the war in Ukraine grinds to a stalemate, Mr. Mokin’s ultimate legacy may be his small role in a much bigger, globally significant enterprise: He was one of tens of thousands of convicts powering the Kremlin’s war machine. Even now, with Mr. Prigozhin dead and Wagner disbanded, Russian inmates are still enlisting in what has become the largest military prison recruitment program since World War II.

In Ukraine, these former inmates have been used mostly as cannon fodder. But they have bolstered the ranks of Russia’s forces, helping President Vladimir V. Putin postpone a new round of mobilization, which would be an unpopular measure domestically. And since many of the inmates come from poor families and rural areas, it has helped Mr. Putin to maintain the veneer of normalcy among well-off Russians in major cities.

“When civilians are mobilized, they are ripped from their families, their jobs,” Aleksandr, one of the surviving recruits from the prison, known as IK6, said in an interview. “As for us, we’ve got nothing to lose.”

Some of the inmates’s reasons for choosing the war were obvious. Many said they were driven by patriotism, a desire to escape prison or a craving for action after years of confinement.

Yet interviews with the fighters and their relatives also revealed a deeper longing for redemption, a powerful emotional force in a country that has long wrestled with the meaning of guilt and sacrifice. For men stuck in the savage, dehumanizing conditions of Russian prisons, the war offered a chance to regain their sense of self-worth, even if it meant potentially taking other lives.

Enlisting has allowed inmates to provide income for families they had burdened for years — and to regain respect in a society that stigmatizes criminal records and honors military service.

The Times obtained the names and details of the 197 initial IK6 recruits, and was able to confirm the fates of 172 of them through 2023. Times reporters interviewed 16 of them, spoke with the families and friends of others, and reviewed social media, court records and a database of war casualties compiled by an independent news outlet, Mediazona.

Together, they form the most comprehensive portrait yet of the convicts who played an outsize role in Russia’s invasion.

The harshest finding was the one Mr. Prigozhin warned of: death. At least one in four recruits who left jail with Mr. Mokin in October 2022 was killed. Most who lived appear to have suffered serious injuries, according to interviews with survivors and relatives.

Russia’s prison service and defense ministry did not respond to questions for this article.

The data shows that the recruits averaged 33 years of age and came mostly from small towns and villages. Their most common crime was selling drugs. They had, on average, five more years left on their sentences in abusive prison conditions, providing an incentive to enlist.

Some men, however, signed up with as little as three months left behind bars, suggesting other motivations than freedom.

Nikolai, a construction worker who was convicted along with his wife for selling drugs, said he joined Wagner out of patriotism. Money also helped. Even if he died, he said, the compensation Wagner promised his family — about $50,000 — would solve their housing problems. “This is wonderful, I thought.”

Even death would have meaning, if he were killed in battle. “I didn’t want to be such a bad person in the eyes of the children in our village,” he said. “I would be remembered not as a convict, but as a man who died in a war.”

‘Human Conveyor’

In some ways, Mr. Putin’s war has turned the country’s entire criminal justice system into a military recruitment tool, experts say. Russia’s extremely high conviction rates — 99.6 percent — its long prison terms, and inhumane conditions inside jails create strong incentives to risk death to obtain freedom.

Wagner said that about 50,000 inmates served in their ranks in Ukraine, and that one in five of them died. Mr. Prigozhin himself died in a plane crash in August, in what Western intelligence agencies have called an assassination, after a failed mutiny against Russia’s military command.

The Russian Army took over Wagner’s prison recruitment program in February, not only maintaining operations but expanding them.

This year, for example, the armed forces began recruiting from pretrial detention centers and immigration detention facilities, according to three Russian prison rights groups. The military has also stepped up efforts to entice Wagner’s inmate veterans back into the war.

Yana Gelmel, an exiled Russian prison rights activist who provided documents, called the system a “human conveyor” for the war effort.

“It suits the state to continue taking these men, because they don’t exist in the eyes of society,” she said.

Located outside the industrial city of Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains, IK6 is a sprawling walled complex of barracks and workshops. It primarily holds inmates who have been convicted on first-time offenses considered “grave” under Russian law. The range of crimes is wide: from violent murders to drug sales and robberies.

“Mostly, it was people who have slipped for the first time, but have slipped pretty hard,” said Yevgeny, an inmate who lost the use of his arm in Ukraine. “Those who have killed while drunk, young drug dealers.” Like other former prisoners, he asked to be identified by only his first name to avoid retribution.

Some recruits had sold illegal substances to bolster meager wages, a review of prison sentences and interviews show. One recruit got six years for growing marijuana and trying to sell 40 grams.

But one of three recruits was serving time for murder. This rate is more than 30 times higher than the overall percentage of murder convicts in the Russian prison system, underscoring the attraction of military service to men with long sentences.

One recruit beat his drinking companion to death with a bat, then set fire to the apartment with the victim in it. Another murdered two men with an ax following a drinking session.

Among the convicted murderers who enlisted is a veteran who asked to be identified by his military call sign, Volk, meaning Wolf.

He said his mother died when he was 6 and that he grew up in foster homes and orphanages. He was imprisoned at 20, after he and another man beat two people to death while drinking, court records show. He was eager to seize Mr. Prigozhin’s offer.

“I got tired of imprisonment, realized that this is not my place,” Volk said after returning from Ukraine. “I understood, took responsibility for what I have done.”

He said he now works as a welder and studies management.

The Prison

Mr. Mokin, the convicted drug seller, had struggled to adjust to life in a prison system that has long been plagued by corruption and abuse.

He told a friend he was constantly bullied by the guards, who punished him with solitary confinement for the smallest infractions. He lacked money to buy basic necessities like toothpaste and underwear, or enjoy small luxuries like cigarettes.

Above all, he said, he was haunted by the shame of relapsing into addiction and the guilt he felt over the death by suicide of a young woman he felt close to.

“I can’t wait till they finally get to us,” he wrote his friend, referring to Wagner recruiters.

His experience appears typical of inmates who struggle to fit into the brutal caste system of many Russian jails. Enforced by underworld leaders known as bratva, the system ostracizes and humiliates inmates deemed to have violated complex social rules that govern Russian criminal life.

Inmates in the bottom rungs are forced to act as servants, carry out demeaning tasks such as cleaning toilets, and can be subjected to sexual abuse. Drug dealers like Mr. Mokin are traditionally assigned low social status.

“All you need to make sure that people keep enlisting is to create bad conditions” in prison, said Anna Karetnikova, a former senior prison official in the Moscow region, who left Russia in protest of the war. “This is not patriotism. It’s survival.”

Reducing the abuse requires paying guards and their surrogates among the inmates, in a system where the authorities relentlessly pursue financial gain, said Nikolai Shchur, a former prison ombudsman for the Chelyabinsk region who has studied the facility extensively.

Virtually any good or service at the prison is available for a price: a family visit, a positive parole letter, drugs, the use of a washing machine. The money is usually transferred by families directly into the accounts of guards or their middlemen.

During the day, about half of the inmates produce goods in a textile or scrap metal shop for about $4 worth of monthly wages. At night, inmates are enticed to participate in marathon card games and incur debts, with the payoffs eventually trickling to overseers.

Until a decade ago, IK6 authorities collected money through violence, according to Mr. Shchur and four former inmates who served sentences there at the time.

They said guards subjected an inmate on arrival to systematic torture called a “break-in” period. Methods included brutal beatings and tying a car alarm to each of the inmate’s ears, according to an official report compiled by Mr. Shchur and confirmed by the former inmates.

The violence eventually backfired. In 2012, the inmates staged one of the largest prison mutinies in modern Russian history, a peaceful rooftop sit-in that was violently repressed by the police days later.

An ensuing scandal led to the appointment of new prison officials, who outsourced the jail’s management to the underworld leaders in return for a share of the money being extorted, according to Mr. Shchur and the former inmates.

Today, the bratva enforce obedience primarily by controlling inmates’ social status. Yet, under their rule, inmates remain dependent on the financial support of family, a burden that appears to have motivated some to enlist.

“He said that he was to blame for winding up in prison, for abandoning his family,” said the former wife of a deceased recruit, Andrei Vorobei. “He didn’t care where he died, in Ukraine or in IK6.”

A Prison at War: The Convicts Sustaining Putin’s Invasion – The New York Times

A Costly Second Chance

In late April, a chartered Russian transport plane carrying about 140 former IK6 inmates landed at a military airfield outside Chelyabinsk, according to interviews and social media posts. It was the last day of their six-month contract, and they had survived.

“At first, it was difficult to comprehend that I got so lucky that I had returned,” said Nikolai, the former construction worker. “It is a feeling of madness bordering on joy.”

Most of the interviewed survivors claimed they have found respect after years of shame. One fighter, Sergei, said that on returning to his village, he changed into new fatigues, pinned on the six medals he had received, and knocked on his family’s door, where his crying mother and flabbergasted father greeted him.

“Their view of me has changed, because now everyone in the village respects them,” he said. “Their son brought back medals from the war.”

Another recruit, Aleksandr, spoke with pride about reconnecting with his estranged daughter. “She was telling everyone at school, ‘papa is at war, papa is at war,’” he said.

A few of the survivors have found factory work, and are trying to move on from prison and war. They said they are grateful to Wagner for honoring the contract terms, and to Mr. Putin for issuing pardons.

“Uncle Vova has pardoned me, forgave me and my brothers,” said a veteran, Andrei, who now works at a textile plant, using an informal version of Mr. Putin’s first name. “He gave us a second chance.”

None of those interviewed questioned the Kremlin’s decision to invade, or its rationale for war. Nor did they reflect on the atrocities and devastation Russian forces have inflicted across Ukraine in almost two years of fighting, including the deaths of thousands of civilians.

Since returning home last spring, some of the former inmates have slipped back into crime, reflecting the difficulties faced by Russians with criminal records. Of the 120 confirmed surviving IK6 recruits, nine have been charged with driving drunk, drug offenses or fraud, court records show.

Other survivors have struggled to find meaning in the decision they made, or to deal with the trauma of war.

Most of those interviewed declined to discuss details of their military service, but they have described the general brutality of the fighting. None explicitly denied Wagner’s draconian disciplinary measures, which reportedly involved the execution of fighters accused of cowardice or insubordination.

Nikolai, the former construction worker, said his initial patriotism soon clashed with what he described as incompetence and corruption among senior military officials, which increased casualties. “Our guys are out there fighting,” he said, “and these political figures are waving their little flags and moving figurines on the maps.”

Image

Whether they survived or not, soldiers said, depended on what unit they were in, who the commanders were, and whether they respected human life.

For Sergei, the medals that reconnected him to his parents have come at a psychological price.

“There’s no sleep. Only alcohol helps,” he said. “You must understand: We walked on intestines,” he added, referring to the shredded bodies on the battlefield.

Those with severe injuries described a bleak experience. An inmate named Dmitri, who lost the use of his legs, recounted how, during a commercial flight home from a military hospital, passengers who purchased priority seating refused to make space for his wheelchair.

“My mother told them that I’m coming back from the special military operation,” he said. “They couldn’t care less.”

He has rarely left home since returning, because his mother is unable to lower his wheelchair to the street.

Yevgeny, a veteran with an injured arm, recounted his typical day in a text message: “I got up. I took my pills, put on my prothesis, put on the compression sock. I prepared breakfast, ate. Took more pills,” he said. “That’s it. Two hours had passed.”

“We were told that the Motherland is in danger, we went to defend it,” he said. “But afterward, no one cares what happens to us.”

Christiaan Triebert contributed research.

The 10 gunmen from Gaza knew exactly how to find the Israeli intelligence hub — and how to get inside.

After crossing into Israel, they headed east on five motorcycles, two gunmen on each vehicle, shooting at passing civilian cars as they pressed forward.

Ten miles later, they veered off the road into a stretch of woodland, dismounting outside an unmanned gate to a military base. They blew open the barrier with a small explosive charge, entered the base and paused to take a group selfie. Then they shot dead an unarmed Israeli soldier dressed in a T-shirt.

For a moment, the attackers appeared uncertain about where to go next. Then one of them pulled something from his pocket: a color-coded map of the complex.

Reoriented, they found an unlocked door to a fortified building. Once inside, they entered a room filled with computers — the military intelligence hub. Under a bed in the room, they found two soldiers taking shelter.

The gunmen shot both dead.

This sequence was captured on a camera mounted on the head of a gunman who was later killed. The New York Times reviewed the footage, then verified the events by interviewing Israeli officials and checking Israeli military video of the attack as well.

They provide chilling details of how Hamas, the militia that controls the Gaza Strip, managed to surprise and outmaneuver the most powerful military in the Middle East last Saturday — storming across the border, overrunning more than 30 square miles, taking more than 150 hostages and killing more than 1,300 people in the deadliest day for Israel in its 75-year history.

With meticulous planning and extraordinary awareness of Israel’s secrets and weaknesses, Hamas and its allies overwhelmed the length of Israel’s front with Gaza shortly after dawn, shocking a nation that has long taken the superiority of its military as an article of faith.

Using drones, Hamas destroyed key surveillance and communications towers along the border with Gaza, imposing vast blind spots on the Israeli military. With explosives and tractors, Hamas blew open gaps in the border barricades, allowing 200 attackers to pour through in the first wave and another 1,800 later that day, officials say. On motorcycles and in pickup trucks, the assailants surged into Israel, overwhelming at least eight military bases and waging terrorist attacks against civilians in more than 15 villages and cities.

Hamas planning documents, videos of the assault and interviews with security officials show that the group had a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of how the Israeli military operated, where it stationed specific units, and even the time it would take for reinforcements to arrive.

The Israeli military says that, once the war is over, it will investigate how Hamas managed to breach its defenses so easily.

But whether the armed forces were careless with their secrets or infiltrated by spies, the revelations have already unnerved officials and analysts who have questioned how the Israeli military — renowned for its intelligence gathering — could have inadvertently revealed so much information about its own operations.

The outcome was a staggering series of atrocities and massacres, in what the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, has described as the worst mass killing of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.

It shattered Israel’s aura of invincibility and provoked an Israeli counterattack on Gaza that has killed more than 1,900 Palestinians in a week, the ferocity of which has never been seen in Gaza.

It also upended assumptions that Hamas, long designated a terrorist group by Israel and many Western nations, had gradually become more interested in running Gaza than in using it to launch major assaults on Israel.

Hamas made Israelis think it was “busy with governing Gaza,” said Ali Barakeh, a Hamas leader, in a television interview on Monday. “All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack,” he added.

‘Hamas In the Kibbutz!’

The terrorists were inside Addi Cherry’s home, on the other side of an unlocked door.

Ms. Cherry, her husband and their three children were hiding inside their eldest son’s bedroom, listening to the gunmen wander around their living room.

“Please help us,” Ms. Cherry texted a friend, as one of the assailants walked closer and closer to the bedroom door.

Then he gripped the door handle.

The Cherry family’s day had begun with a burst of rockets from Gaza, not long after 6 a.m.

Ms. Cherry, an economist, and her husband, Oren, an engineer, rushed with their children into their eldest son’s bedroom, which doubled as a bomb shelter.

Initially, the events of the morning felt distressingly familiar. The Cherry family lives in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a rural village of some 500 residents, a few hundred yards east of the border with Gaza. Early morning rocket fire — and the ensuing rush to the safe room — is a frequent feature of life in the region.

“Like always,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

But this morning soon felt different. The rockets kept coming, many of them headed deep into Israeli territory.

Then, from the fields around the village, came the sound of gunshots.

Mr. Cherry left the bedroom, and peeked through the shutters on their living room windows.

“Oh God,” Ms. Cherry remembered her husband shouting. “Hamas in the kibbutz! Hamas in the kibbutz!”

It was 7:20 a.m.

Hundreds of Hamas invaders, carrying guns, shoulder-borne rocket launchers and wearing the group’s green headband, were streaming through the village fields.

It was part of a coordinated assault that, documents and video show, assigned squads of assailants to precise targets. As some swept through military bases, others charged into residential areas, ruthlessly kidnapping and killing civilians.

They would reach the Cherrys’ street within minutes.

The family had to act quickly. Their bomb shelter — a teenager’s bedroom — had no lock.

The parents grabbed a chair, and wedged it under the door handle — making it harder to open.

They dragged a small cabinet, and pressed it against the chair.

Then they waited. There was an army base next to the village. Its troops would be here within minutes, Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

What she didn’t know was that many of them were already dead.

‘Take soldiers and civilians’

All along the border, the Hamas gunmen had already overrun most, if not all, of the Israeli border bases.

Footage from the attackers’ head-mounted cameras, including the video of the raid on the intelligence hub, showed Hamas gunmen — from its highly trained Nukhba brigade — smashing through the barricades of several bases in the first light of the morning.

After breaching, they were merciless, gunning down some soldiers in their beds and underwear. In several bases, they knew exactly where the communications servers were and destroyed them, according to a senior Israeli army officer.

With much of their communications and surveillance systems down, the Israelis often couldn’t see the commandos coming. They found it harder to call for help and mount a response. In many cases, they were unable to protect themselves, let alone the surrounding civilian villages.

A Hamas planning document — found by Israeli emergency responders in one village — showed that the attackers were organized into well-defined units with clear goals and battle plans.

One platoon had designated navigators, saboteurs and drivers — as well as mortar units in the rear to provide cover for the attackers, the document shows.

The group had a specific target — a kibbutz — and the attackers were tasked with storming the village from specific angles. They had estimates for how many Israeli troops were stationed in nearby posts, how many vehicles they had at their disposal, and how long it would take those Israeli relief forces to reach them.

The document is dated October 2022, suggesting that the attack had been planned for at least a year.

Elsewhere, other assailants were posted to key road junctions to ambush Israeli reinforcements, according to four senior officers and officials.

Some units had specific instructions to capture Israelis for use as bargaining chips in future prisoner exchanges with Israel.

“Take soldiers and civilians as prisoners and hostages to negotiate with,” the document said.

‘We Are Going to Die’

The terrorists smashed their way into the Cherrys’ house shortly before 10 a.m., according to texts that Ms. Cherry sent friends at the time.

They had already killed the kibbutz guards, as well as a civilian security volunteer who had rushed to confront them in the opening moments of the assault, according to the village leadership.

Now, the terrorists were going house by house, trying to find people to kill and kidnap.

“Please send help,” Ms. Cherry typed into her phone.

At the Cherrys’ house, they forced in the door. Then they charged in, shouting and ransacking the house, Ms. Cherry said.

“We are going to die,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

The family waited in terrified silence, hoping the intruders would ignore the door to the bedroom and assume everyone was away.

Mr. and Mrs. Cherry put all their weight against the cabinet, to brace the chair underneath the door handle.

Guy, 15, their eldest son, stood next to the door, holding an 18-pound dumbbell. If someone did break in, the plan was to drop it on the assailant’s head.

Then the handle twitched.

The parents began to push the cabinet.

The handle continued to rattle.

Then it stopped. The assailant walked away.

A few streets away, the family of Miki Levi, who oversees the kibbutz gardens, had an even closer call.

After a terrorist squad chased Mr. Levi, 47, inside his safe room, the attackers sprayed bullets at the reinforced door, Mr. Levi said in an interview.

Some of the bullets pierced the door, creating large openings, and Mr. Levi said he also fired back with his pistol, shredding it further. His wife and two young daughters sheltered to the side.

Changing tactics, the terrorists later brought two of his neighbors — a mother and her 12-year-old daughter, Mr. Levi said.

At gunpoint, the mother and child were told to persuade him to open up, Mr. Levi said.

“‘Come out and stop shooting,’” Mr. Levi recounted one of them saying. “‘The terrorists won’t do anything to you.’”

Eventually, the terrorists gave up that approach and returned with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, Mr. Levi said.

It was only when Mr. Levi shot one attacker in the thigh that they finally left, he added.

The mother and child, Mr. Levi suspects, are now captives in Gaza.

‘Bodies Were Burning’

Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus said he drove south without knowing where exactly he should go.

General Goldfus, 46, a paratrooper commander, had been on leave at home, jogging in his neighborhood north of Tel Aviv. Then he saw a video from the south, showing terrorists cruising through a city, entirely unimpeded.

Without waiting for orders, the general said he ran home, changed into his uniform and headed south.

He picked up guns and two soldiers from his base in central Israel, and called friends and colleagues to find out what was happening.

Only a few picked up. Of the rest, “There was nobody really understanding the full picture,” General Goldfus said in an interview.

The speed, precision and scale of Hamas’s attack had thrown the Israeli military into disarray, and for many hours afterward civilians were left to fend for themselves.

Using the few scraps of information he could glean, General Goldfus said he and the soldiers headed to a village north of Nahal Oz, and then gradually worked their way south.

It was around 10 a.m. All around him was carnage and atrocity.

Dead Israelis lined the roads, alongside the husks of burned-out, overturned cars.

At the site of an all-night outdoor rave, gunmen had killed an estimated 260 partygoers.

“Bodies were burning,” General Goldfus remembered seeing at the site.

The attack by Hamas had unleashed a violent free-for-all. Some residents of Gaza had poured over the undefended border after it was breached, at times streaming what they were doing on their phones. Gazans were looting and ransacking homes, taking computers, clothes, crockery, televisions and phones, survivors said.

In some Israeli villages, residents had been burned alive in their homes, while terrorists stalked civilians at every turn, looking for people to capture and kill. Grandparents, toddlers and a nine-month-old baby were seized and taken back to Gaza, some of them squeezed between their kidnappers on motorcycles.

And during much of the mayhem, the Israeli army was almost nowhere to be seen.

Near Kibbutz Reim, General Goldfus said he ran into another senior commander by chance. Like him, the officer had rushed to the scene on instinct, without any instructions, and had assembled a small group of soldiers.

There and then, the two men came up with their own ad hoc strategy.

“There’s no orders here,” General Goldfus said. “I said: ‘You take from this place and further south — and I’ll take from this place and further north.’”

That was how some of the Israeli counterattack took place: soldiers or civilian volunteers — including retired generals in their 60s — rushing to the region and doing what they could.

Israel Ziv, a former general, reached a nearby battle in his Audi.

Yair Golan, a retired deputy chief of staff and former leftist lawmaker, said he took a gun and began rescuing survivors of a massacre at a rave, who were hiding in nearby bushes.

“We are brought up to run as fast as possible toward the fire,” said General Goldfus. “So that we can be the first one there.”

‘It’s O.K. We’re Jewish.’

The intelligence hub near Gaza was one of the first places to be recaptured by Israel.

In the late morning, soldiers and reservists from different units reached the base from separate directions, overpowering the 10 Gazan gunmen who had filmed their deadly assault on video.

The camera mounted on the Hamas commander’s head captured the moment he was shot and killed. The camera falls off, bouncing along the ground. By the time the video stops, the commander can be seen slumped on the ground, revealing his long beard and thinning hairline.

In other parts of southern Israel, the first formal reinforcements came from an Israeli commando unit that arrived in helicopters, according to the senior Israeli officer.

They were followed by other special operations units, including Israeli navy seals and a reconnaissance unit trained to operate deep inside enemy lines, rather than on Israeli soil.

Sometimes, the commandos joined forces with volunteers without body armor who had rushed into the fray to rescue family members.

Noam Tibon, a former general, drove south with his pistol to try to retake Kibbutz Nahal Oz, where his son, Amir, a journalist, was trapped.

In the early afternoon, the elder Mr. Tibon joined a squad that was making its way through the kibbutz, house by house.

By Sunday afternoon, several villages and bases still had some kind of Hamas presence. The whole area would not be fully secured for days.

Ms. Cherry emerged around 5 p.m. on Saturday in Kibbutz Nahal Oz to find her home turned upside down, the microwave torn from the wall, drawers ripped from their cabinets and a pool of drying blood on the floor.

She had heard a gun battle in and around her home earlier in the day. She believed a terrorist had died in the house — and that his bloodied corpse had been carried off by fellow fighters.

Some survivors refused to open up, even after the army arrived.

When soldiers reached the home of Oshrit Sabag, another resident of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, she feared they were terrorists in disguise.

Even after the soldiers began chatting to one another in Hebrew, to prove who they were, Ms. Sabag, 48, was unconvinced.

It was only their Jewish prayers that made her relax.

“‘It’s O.K., it’s O.K.,’” Ms. Sabag remembered them saying. “‘We’re Jewish.’”

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.