Gregory's Server14/ Maltsev spent four days in a shell hole on top of corpses whose recovery had been forbidden by their commanders. "He lived on the dead. He took cookies out of their pockets and ate them,” says another soldier. In December 2023, Maltsev and his entire unit were killed in Krynky.
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16/ Berić says that the Serbs refused to join the assault and requested a transfer to another unit with “real Russian officers.” In response, all their ammunition and weapons were taken away, and the men – including those sick with pneumonia – were driven into the forest. 17/ They spent two days in the open in freezing cold without food or water and were not allowed to approach the kitchen. Military police came to the Serbs on 8 January, “accused them of espionage, opened fire in the dugouts,” and began beating the mercenaries with rifle butts. 18/ Berić's video caused a mini-scandal, and his unit was reportedly reassigned to the command of the Chechen Akhmat battalion. His house in Donetsk was burned down yesterday in an attack that he has blamed on his "enemies". 19/ Other soldiers have reported being handcuffed or tied to trees for days at a time to 'motivate' them to fight. Such punishments are, at least in principle, completely against the Russian military code, but in practice, officers say the situation is more "elastic". "Whether in my new military unit or in the 24th Motorised Rifle [Regiment], we have a complete ass, chaos, lawlessness, a swinish attitude towards people, and we ourselves are turning into embittered animals," one officer says. 20/ Others are more sanguine. An Airborne Forces officer says that "bullying is something the hohols [Ukrainians] do. We have educational work, cruel but fair. We don’t just fuck anyone." He points to the low quality of the army's recruits as making harsh discipline necessary. 21/ "There are a lot of mobiks here, men who signed a contract recently, and before that they were drinking in garages, and similar characters. Do they have discipline? No. To maintain discipline, you need to fuck them hard. You can call it bullying, but for us it’s a job on which our lives depend.” He admits, though, that at the front line "everything is one big unofficial punishment”. 22/ “Pits, basements, bullshit, threats. Do you know how many 500s [deserters] there were in our direction last year? There are hundreds of them here. And what to do with them all? There aren't enough military police to clean up this shit. If you don't go to the assault, you go to the basement. It works." (By "basement" he is referring to the Russian army's use of improvised prisons where soldiers are starved and beaten to force them to return to the front line.) 23/ The officer's comments highlight the Russian army's apparently severe problems with desertion. On the one hand, an artilleryman says that it's very difficult to run away from the front line. "You have to go through a lot of lines. It’s not clear where you’ll run into anyone." 24/ Soldiers have instead taken the opportunity to flee while on visits to the rear, for example on trips to the hospital. The military authorities in the Kherson region have cracked down by stopping soldiers going to the hospital, even if they are wounded and need treatment. 25/ A soldier says that they "practically stopped taking people to the hospital from [Kherson region] in the winter of 2023. They don’t take you to the hospital even if you’re injured. They provided help, whoever was nearby, and then fed us breakfast. But there is no calm here. 26/ "Constant fighting. Sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more. They don't talk about losses in the news at all. And they must be assessed as catastrophic. They don't feel sorry for people at all. It's like they're not people. And this makes everyone around me go wild." 27/ The soldier suggests that his unit is deliberately hiding the scale of its desertions – some of whom may have surrendered – likely to avoid commanders facing embarassing questions, in an example of the Russian military's ingrained culture of lying. "[These are] cards of my missing guys, who were in the group at first, and then they were simply deleted! I accidentally managed to save a few. This is only a small number, they are simply cleared from the database so as not to be looked for."  and all this horror and brutality for what? for the nostalgia and vanity of a cadre of mafia goons in moscow and st petersburg who want to revive past russian "glory" well here is your "glory" you ethnofascist mass murderers  @benroyce @ChrisO_wiki Putin is destroying the Russian future for nothing. @Raccoon @ChrisO_wiki they were already in demographic crisis. solution: as you say, a meat grinder. degrade the economy to a medieval war footing and place yourself in vassal status to china. destroy all diplomatic goodwill except with the likes of north korea and iran. drive anyone with foresight and means to flee at the start of the war, humungous brain drain. etc russia reduced to a destitute pariah barking threats to nuke everyone. pure tragedy. the end game of mafia thugocracy |
15/ Brutal punishments are not just confined to Russian fighters. In January 2024, Serbian nationalist mercenary Dejan Berić published a video in which he complained that his fellow mercenaries were sent on an assault without grenade launchers and with only two magazines of bullets.