Gregory's Server20/ 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.
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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 |
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”.