After a chair dance in the Russian army, General Valéri Guérassimov was appointed Chief of General Staff on 11 January. Along with the new leadership, the country’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, has plotted large-scale military reforms that will change the lives of soldiers who make up the front in Ukraine.
Among the measures that will be imposed, according to the authorities, to professionalize the armed forces, are the requirement for a haircut and shaved beard, in addition to appropriate uniforms. Fighters will also no longer be able to carry cell phones.
THE think tank The American Institute for War Studies (IS) assesses that the changes reflect the need to quickly organize Russian soldiers, most of them reservists called up by President Vladimir Putin in September last year.
ISW points out that the issue of hygiene on the front lines has often been a sticking point between officers and combatants. In an interview with the Russian news website RBC, relayed by Reuters, deputy and former high-ranking officer Viktor Sobolev considered the beard ban to be an “elementary aspect of military discipline”. “A soldier is seen by civilians, he must have an exemplary appearance. If he walks around unkempt and unshaven, it does him no honor as a person or as a soldier,” he said.
“This measure may seem trivial, but respect or disrespect for these standards is a marker of professionalism by conventional troops,” notes ISW. “In underperforming and demoralized units, failure to meet these standards can fuel demoralization and underperformance,” the institute points out.
Prohibition of electronic devices
The ban on the use of electronic equipment for personal use in the army already exists, but it is rarely respected. With the recent decree, the Ministry of Defense intends to avoid a new massacre, after the Ukrainian attack that killed at least 89 Russian soldiers (400, according to the Ukrainian military authorities), in the heart of the provisional military barracks of Makiïvk, during the New Year. Russian Defense blamed Russian soldiers who used their cell phones to wish their loved ones a Happy New Year.
The electronic devices would have allowed Ukraine to geographically locate a large concentration of soldiers and strike with precision.
Cell phones were also compromising in the case of soldier Alexander Lechkov, recruited in Siberia. Videos went viral on the internet showing that the combatant insulted and pushed a colonel during a discussion about helmets and protective vests. Lechkov was therefore sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
In the field of war, however, the devices are also used for troop defense – piloting drones to recognize locations and people and transmit information.
“Tablets and smartphones are essential for modern warfare,” the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Evgeny Prigojine, said in an interview with Russian state media. “Thanks to the collected data, the fighters know the general situation and can transmit vital information,” he said.
stricter punishments
A decree establishing more severe penalties for offending soldiers was issued on December 30, 2022 and is expected to come into effect in the coming weeks. Developed by the Ministry of Defense, it updates a practice abandoned twenty years ago: the installation of military prisons at Russian army bases.
calls from gaouptvakhty, these headquarters will be able to host military personnel accused of serious disciplinary infractions, such as refusing to fight or leaving a position or military base. The text specifies that these places of detention must be installed in containers suitable for the combatants’ quality of life.
This is because, in mid-2022, video leaks revealed that soldiers were being detained in underground passages in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. According to the records, dozens of men would have been forced to huddle together for weeks in these places.
As revealed by the BBC’s Russian language service, which evaluated more than 300 judicial decisions in the country, it reveals that there is a progressive hardening of sentences. It also shows that situations that exempted soldiers from punishment, such as body injuries, no longer prevent them from being on the front lines and that some wounded are sent back to the field without undergoing medical evaluation.
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