Mutiny in the Ranks

Even Ukrainian commanders say Russia's obsession with Bakhmut is perplexing.

"We're just sent in for slaughter. The commanders are telling us in the face we're disposable soldiers and our only chance to go back home is to get injured in fighting."

"The commanders don't care about our lives. We're asking for help. We have no one else to turn to."

Russian conscript, Irkutsk, Siberia

"We don't know how much of this discontent is left unpublicized but those videos most likely speak to the use of 'human wave attacks' widely reported by the Ukrainian army."

Ruslan Leviev, head, investigative Conflict Intelligence Team

"Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin], this is a plea from men mobilized from the Irkutsk region."

"We're asking you to look into the illegal and criminal orders of our commanders and take action."

Russian conscript, Irkutsk region

"Why should I fight there? What for? Who for? They're sending us to a sure death."

"Go jail us! How much is it? 5, 7, 10 [years' imprisonment]."

"I don't give a damn. At least I'll get to live."

Mobilized soldier from 1,004th regiment

 

Videos and messages being sent from the Russian army inside Ukraine have been proliferating of late, revealing fighting among servicemen from the Russian military on the front lines and the local Donetsk militia members.  The offensive in Donetsk's north appears to be faltering. Chaos reigns. Mobilized soldiers recently sent to the front are refusing their orders to face "certain death" by "human wave" attacks they claim have been eliminating units in their entirety.

Some of the servicemen have taken to their trust in Vladimir Putin by appealing to him directly, describing fears of their persona existential plight. It obviously has passed their notice that it is on his personal orders that they find themselves in such a dilemma; fight for the glory of Russian conquest, or die. Do both, in actual fact, the President of Russia would have it so.

New reports describe fighters refusing to risk their lives as human decoys, being locked into basements, deprived of the necessities of life until such time that they find themselves agreeing that they might survive becoming a target. A new unit has been created within the Russian military dedicated to rounding up all the "lost" soldiers who have been deserting, fleeing or attempting to find the whereabouts of their teams. 

Video messages have been recorded by soldiers from sixeen different regions since earlu February. Soldiers point a finger of blame at commanders who use them in "human wave" attacks, reports the Russian media outlet Verstka. According to military observers, it has become increasingly common to make use of sending "human waves" of poorly trained, poorly armed fighters into the line of fire to try to overwhelm the opposition.

 

Ukrainian soldiers near Bakhmut fire mortars toward Russian positions

 

Staggering Russian losses of up to a thousand men a day have been reported by Ukrainian forces. The grinding battle to take Bakhmut has succeeded in stalling the Russian advance. A small, contested city, smashed by months of shelling, an elusive 'prize' that the entire Russian military apparatus allied with the dreaded Wagner Group of mercenaries, are unable to penetrate and destroy the Ukrainian military's defence.

The unit of one Russian appealing to Putin had made a previous appeal to no avail, and was ultimately "almost completely wiped out", said a successor unit. Four pleas from the 1,439th regiment failed to move Putin with their desperate cries for release from the hell he has consigned them to. Leading their female relatives back home to record a desperate video themselves, addressing Putin as "our only hope" to "save our men". 

"The commanders have abandoned them and told them not to leave their positions. Our men have been without food or water for a few days but surviving under constant shelling", wrote the women in yet another desperate plea. An Irkutsk media outlet in exile, People of Baikal, traced the men's relatives after desperate pleas were posted on local social media groups subsequently deleted. One of the wives recording the appeal described her husband as a "patriot who respected Putin and thought he was ding everything right in Ukraine".

"[The commander] was sending them for slaughter: People were shot and killed like at a shooting range. The guys were alone in a minefield, without any air support of any reinforcement", said the wife.  Utter disarray in the Russian ranks have been reported from even pro-Kremlin sources. One of Russia's most popular pro-war Telegram channels, Rybar, admitted the country's army faces problems of soldiers who "got lost". Convicts recruited to fight are rebelling.

A video showing conscripted convicts thrown into a basement outside Donetsk being punished for refusing to follow orders was published in media outlet Ostorozhno Novosti this week. Only 11 people from their unit of 71 men survived, they said. Mobilized men from 1,004th regiment were videoed confronting a commander dispatched from their native Kaliningrad to address a mutiny. The men shouted at him that they've been used as "meat", refusing to return to the attack. 

Ukrainian tanks roll toward the front line in the Donetsk region.

Insufferable Russian Sanctimony

"They’re all [Russian servicemen] reporting being pressured, facing the threat of criminal charges, being discharged, or having their documents withheld." 

"For protection from a possible criminal investigation, please contact our lawyers."

Pavel Chikov, head, Agora international human rights group

Ukrainian sources speak of an unusually large death toll among Russian soldiers. The number of casualties among the Russian military according to Ukrainian sources is roughly 19,000 personnel. Russia, while admitting it has lost quite a few servicemen, put the number of their deaths at 1,083. Of that total, 217 represent officers, from junior lieutenants to generals, since it is customary for elite Russian officers to frequently fight alongside their units in view of decision-making derived through high-ranking personnel.

 

Ukrainian servicemen carry a victim to be placed next to other casualties after a bombing of the railway station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, in the Donbas region, April 8, 2022. Herve Bar/AFP/Getty

What Russian military spokespeople will not admit publicly is the problems facing the Russian command of downright refusals among their servicemen to carry out Russian orders. Orders such as the one that led to the bombing of a train station targeting Ukrainian citizens, men, women and children along with the elderly attempting to move from high-impact bombing areas to safer parts of Ukraine, or to cross the border to safety. Dozens of people were killed and around 100 injured Friday in a Russian rocket attack on the Kramatorsk train station, of evacuees trying to escape the Donbas.

 

Over fifteen percent of confirmed Russian military deaths are represented by the VDV, Russian elite airborne units. The issue of desertions is not a matter of public discussion, however. Yet, the Pskoyskava Guberniya newspaper revealed that some 60 Russian paratroopers after refusing orders to deploy to Ukraine from Belarus where they assumed they were stated for exercises, are now facing  disciplinary action.

 

Members of two national guard units, refusing to fight in Ukraine were reported by Russian media, and that servicemen from over 17 cities have sought assistance in avoiding being sent to Ukraine, or have asked for help to enable them to return home to Russia from Ukraine. Obviously, morale is at an historic low, Russian troops are  unwilling to remain in Ukraine to fulfill their government's aspirations to remove Ukraine's government, in the process destroying the country's infrastructure.

 

A destroyed Russian tank in Borodianka, Ukraine. Photograph: Ceng Shou Yi/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

 

Whether it is through Kremlin orders or through anger and frustration that murderous atrocities in Mariupol and Bucha have taken place will eventually come to light, even as German intelligence in intercepting unencrypted messaging has revealed that civilian massacres were under discussion among Russian commanders. In six weeks' invasion Russia has caused over four million people to flee their homes, killing thousands and made rubble heaps of towns and cities.

There has been a price to pay, in a hobbled Russian economy and an isolation it has brought upon itself by shocking the world through its snarling no-holds-barred invasion and use of airborne bombs and distanced artillery. Russia itself has been shocked by the unexpected resolve of the Ukrainian people, their government and their military to thwart Moscow's plans to disembowel Ukraine's governing body and cripple its Western-oriented aspirations for the future.

When Dmitry Peskov, spokesman and chief apologist/explainer for the Kremlin decried his country's rising death toll, it was a departure from custom for Russia: "We have significant losses of troops. It's a huge tragedy for us", he said, speaking to the media. There is evidently no room in Russia's sorrow for its misfortune through misadventure of the excruciating pain they have caused to the people of an adjoining nation through indiscriminate mass murder.

The indefatigable Ukrainian Mayor Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rallied his nation, inspired his troops, unceasingly addressed the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, the United States, Canada and other nations' heads imploring them to come to Ukraine's aid against an implacable enemy. Sympathy for Ukraine's plight flows from all civilized nations of the world, even those who hesitate to give Russia cause to call them enemies and invoke its wrath, quailing before the prospect of being cut off from their major energy source.

"Once and for all, we can teach Russia and any other potential aggressors that those who choose war always lose", President Zelenskyy stated in his address to the Greek parliament. None disagree with his carefully chosen words and their passionate delivery, yet none while pledging material support, venture to offer physical support for fear of offending Moscow, for fear of Vladimir Putin's spite, for fear of Russia's nuclear threats manipulating a fearful world.

 

Firefighters extinguish an apartment house after a Russian rocket attack in Kharkiv (Associated Press/Pavel Dorogoy)

 

Moscow insists the photographs of mangled civilian bodies in Bucha, the mass grave, those who were mutilated, murdered and left in the streets to decompose was in reality a staged plot by Ukraine to besmirch Russia. Despite its losses -- in personnel and heavy war machinery -- Putin insists on his agenda to denazify Ukraine carrying on; if not in Ukraine's North, then in the East where he has a more secure foothold.

"Evacuate! The chances of saving yourself and your family from Russian death are dwindling every day!" broadcasted Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai. A criminal investigation has been opened by Moscow into claims that a Russian soldier was beaten and given death threats while held in Ukraine as a prisoner of war. No internal investigation, though, of the deaths of hundreds in Bucha by Russian soldiers necessary of course, since it was all a Ukrainian plot.

According to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Moscow had been presented by Kyiv with a draft peace agreement containing "unacceptable" elements and which deviated notably from previously agreed-upon proposals. Unsurprisingly so, since Moscow will accept nothing less than the complete neutering of Ukraine, a country with no history, no culture, no authority, no sovereignty, according to Mr. Putin, and now he will accord it no aspirations for its future, as well.

Local residents pass by a damaged Russian tank in the town of Trostsyanets, some 400 km east of Kyiv, Ukraine (Efrem Lukatsky/The Associated Press)