Vladimir Putin sends 300,000 new recruits to Ukraine. Many of them come to the front without proper training. What that means exactly is explained by a unit directly from the Ukraine. The fighters whine about the lies of the commanders.
In a video, a group of new Russian recruits expressed dissatisfaction with their deployment in the war. As the British historian Chris Owen writes, the soldiers belong to the 15th Motorized Rifle Regiment. They were drafted on September 28th. The video is from October 8 near the eastern Ukrainian town of Lyman, which was recaptured by the Ukrainian army in early October.
The soldiers complain about how bad their equipment is and how often they have been lied to. They would have been brought to the front – without training, without usable weapons, without food, without water, without orders and with corrupt commanders, so the basic message.
These are the biggest problems:
After their mobilization in the region around Moscow, the recruits were taken to the Belgorod region near the Ukrainian border, she says. “We were accommodated in a tent,” they report. Everything was chaotic.
The officers said they didn’t even know the new recruits were coming. Weapons and ammunition would have just been lying around, partly under a thick layer of mud. They were as good as useless. The assault rifle was damp and rusted. “You can’t go to war with that,” says one of the soldiers in the video.
“We didn’t get any training, we weren’t even assigned,” said the new recruits. Every morning they were told they should come back tomorrow. “We were consistently lied to that we were going to receive any type of training.”
Only once were they taken to shooting practice. It was just the day when Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu came by for an inspection. “It was just for show,” said one recruit.
Another soldier says: “All were not properly trained. Some have not even seen a military vehicle. You don’t know the functions. They don’t even know how to start the vehicle.”
Many in the unit were not in good physical condition, it said. This rendered her unable to cope with the physical demands of military action.
“We have fit guys here. But we also have some that cannot carry 15 kilograms. And a backpack with a rifle, ammunition and grenades weighs 20-25 kilograms. They can’t run with it on the battlefield. And we never practiced that either.”
Those soldiers who have experience and are specialists were not classified according to their strengths. Although the regiment consists of riflemen, they were placed in a tank driver unit. The commanders would have divided the fighters and said: “You are now a mechanic”, “You are now a tank specialist”.
At some point, the supervisors noticed that they had been given the wrong unit. “They said we were taken to the wrong place by mistake. We should pack up and be taken somewhere else.”
The recruits were promised by the Russian government that they should receive something like 250,000 to 300,000 rubles a month. That’s about 4050 to 4850 euros. “It turned out to be a lie,” the soldiers said. Instead of paying them in cash, they were told they would be given cards to pay with. “We haven’t seen any of these cards.”
And of course they are useless anyway. After all, there would be no ATMs on the battlefield. And that becomes a problem. Because the soldiers have to buy their own food and drink. “We’ve been without food for two days,” said one fighter. “We have no water, nothing.”
They also say: “We’re screwed all the time.” Because many of them had to go into debt when they had to buy their own clothing and protective equipment for the mission. They “never saw” the equipment promised in Moscow, according to the soldiers.
“Supervisors don’t give us any information and they lie to us about what’s going on,” the soldiers said. “If you go to an officer and ask him what to do, where to do it, how to do it – nobody tells us anything.”
A colonel told the men they were being “stupid”. They are in an army, in a war, and sometimes commanders are forced to act the way they do.
Apparently that’s not enough for the soldiers. At the front they were “only destroyed” for the first two and a half days. They didn’t want to discredit the Russian army or refuse to serve, but they wanted to draw attention to their bad situation, they said.
