Because they have to fight Ukrainian tanks alone with guns and are poorly supplied, Russian soldiers make their situation public.
MOSCOW – Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, videos of Russian soldiers standing in front of the camera in small groups and drawing attention to abuses in the Russian armed forces have appeared again and again. It’s about a lack of training, incompetent commanders, as well as inadequate equipment and missing payments. A new video of this type has now been found by the Twitter channel “Wartranslated”, which specializes in translations of finds from the Ukraine war, and posted it on Twitter with English subtitles.
In the two-and-a-half-minute video, which bears the logo of the Telegram news service, where it was apparently first posted, the men say they were recruited in September 2022 in the southern Russian region of Altai Krai and are currently on the war front in the Ukraine. They had been attacked by Ukrainian tanks for hours at their position and had no choice but to behave defensively. Since they were not provided with an artillery unit, the spokesman explains in the video that their only alternative was to counter the tanks with rifles. And they are “not ready” for that.
Russian soldiers in the Ukraine war: “We are here in row zero”
The soldier repeatedly emphasized that he and his comrades could not fight under the given conditions and addressed the word directly to the Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, whom he called on to provide the group with suitable means of fighting “as soon as possible”. In other, similar videos, the war effort is usually not generally criticized, but explicitly denounced the poor conditions at the front.
According to the further explanations in the video, the lack of equipment and support from artillery troops is not the only reason for complaint. The soldiers not only lack support from artillery units and suitable equipment, but everywhere. This starts with the poor communication with the military leadership, which in the soldiers’ documents lists units whose existence the soldiers and their families in Russia now doubt. The commander’s statement that they were moved to the “third defensive line” after a violent attack was also obviously a lie: “We’re in row zero here,” says the soldier in the video.
Russian soldiers threaten refusal to fight in Ukraine
When it comes to supplies, things are looking bad for the Russian soldiers. After asking their commanders to provide them with water and food, they were verbally abused in return. “They tell you that there is food and water at the front in the forest – there isn’t,” says the soldier. Ammunition is also usually delivered when it is not yet needed. As for treating the injured, it took around seven hours for help to arrive, which has already resulted in some of the soldiers losing their arms and legs, although with proper treatment they would not have been seriously injured.
Just a few hours earlier, a video of another group of soldiers had surfaced, also subtitled by Wartranslated. About the US newspaper had Newsweek reported. The second video shows soldiers from different regiments who are now fighting in a company. Only 40 of the more than 100 soldiers remained, and the care for the injured was miserable here, too. However, they actually threaten to stop the fight, because in addition to the poor supply (“No food. No water. Nothing.”), they have not received any pay since January, some of which they have had to use to buy their own ammunition.
For this reason, the men announce that they were to be forcibly relocated again on the day of admission, July 6, but are determined to fight back. The reports do not provide any information as to whether they carried out their threat and what has happened to the men since then. (saka)
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