Videos and recorded telephone conversations are being shared in Ukraine that are said to show dwindling morale in Russia.
Kiev – “This is a place where you could go crazy,” says a suspected Chechen soldier fighting for Russia in Ukraine. In one Video, shared by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, the soldier shows two bodies lying on the ground. “This is what it looks like here and the bombings continue. I hope the same thing doesn’t happen to us and that we return home.”
“Those who are here with us are afraid to come out,” he says. According to Gerashchenko, he is referring to Russian soldiers. “Half the battalion no longer comes out to fight.” They sit in underground holes wet and without food. “They refuse to do anything and I'm out here rushing around.” Pointing to sparse remnants of trees and military equipment, he says, “This is what's left. We live here. The enemy is ahead.” The goal is to take this piece of land from the enemy. “Half our battalion will die here.”
Chechen soldier possibly injured shortly after shooting
Gerashchenko calls himself an “enemy of Russian propaganda” and repeatedly shares videos in which he refutes statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Whether the soldier's most recently shared video was real was confirmed by IPPEN.MEDIA cannot be verified. According to Gerashchenko, the soldier's name is Hamzat, he was injured shortly after the recordings and is in a coma.
At the beginning of January, the President of the Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, made a bizarre proposal to the West: Ukrainian prisoners of war should be released in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. He had repeatedly sent soldiers to Ukraine since 2022. But Chechen men are also fighting against Russia on the Ukraine side.
Russia: “Half a battalion is sitting in the woods without fighting”
A similar case was reported in which half a Russian battalion refused to fight Kyiv Post. Accordingly, a telephone conversation between a Russian commander and his friend was intercepted, in which the commander reported that his “half a battalion” was supposedly sitting “somewhere in the woods” and refused to continue fighting.
The commander's superior found out about it first and made the person on the phone “look like an idiot.” However, be loud Kyiv Post It is not clear whether the story was perhaps made up by the superior to explain the lack of success. A Russian battalion therefore consists of 250 to 1,000 soldiers. The authenticity of these recordings has also not been verified.
In the Ukrainian war, men and women on both sides fight and die over a few meters of land, neither side can achieve decisive victories. Ukraine may have scored a major blow against Russia in the Black Sea. But many men no longer want to fight voluntarily for Ukraine either: at the end of 2023, Ukraine launched a search for conscription. (cat)
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