A group of Russian troops sent to Ukraine to fight for the Kremlin’s ‘new’ territory threaten to wreak absolute hell on what they describe as pointless suicide missions – and they’ve made it clear they’re willing to turn their guns on members of their army. possibly own team.
The Kaliningrad conscripts have already appealed directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin to complain about old weapons, lack of training and people dying ‘for nothing’. In a video released publicly earlier this week, they shamed the military’s leadership by saying there doesn’t seem to be any battlefield strategy and declaring that “this is no way to go to war”.
Now a video has been leaked documenting the aftermath of their complaints. In a five-minute clip released by independent outlet Ostorozhno, Novosti, the men can be seen surrounding a commander dispatched from Kaliningrad, warning him that they will fight if they are not heard.
‘You can imprison us all! How many years is it, 5, 7, 10? We don’t give a fuck!” shouts a soldier after the commander tries to convince them to follow orders and storm Ukrainian positions.
The troops say they were never intended to be part of assault teams, but were instead assigned as members of territorial defense. The Kremlin-backed proxy forces fighting in occupied Donetsk, they say, send them on suicide missions while themselves “running” or loitering away from the gunfire.
They scream that they would rather go to jail than go on failed strike missions “for who knows what”.
‘Did you see that pool of blood here? That person was sent to the storm [Ukrainian positions], so he pulled the trigger, because he knew where he was going,” says a soldier. “Do you want suicides here?”
After the commander replies that they have made a “weak” argument for disobeying orders, they warn that they will use force.
“Nobody’s going to go with this storm. You can fucking imprison us all. And if someone tries to trick us and say we’re supposedly not going there and then they throw us on the front line, it’s going to be a shit show, it’s not going to be forgive, we’ll just take them on,” says a soldier.
“Honestly, we are ready for that,” he says, asking the whole group, “Is everyone ready for that?”
“Yes Yes! Everyone!” the group responds in unison.
“We are so damn angry after our friends’ deaths,… we walk on foot, we leave by taxi. Fight yourself!” says the apparent leader of the group.
He then tells the commander that several other soldiers had been “carried away”, apparently after also protesting circumstances.
“They came at night. What is that? Is it 1939? NKVD? Black ravens?” he said, referring to the Soviet secret police rounding up “enemies” during nighttime raids.
The latest conscript uprising is just the latest of many, as the Russian war machine is running out of men to use as cannon fodder. And in a particularly ironic twist, more and more of the same young Russian citizens that Putin claimed he was trying to protect against outside forces with his full-scale invasion are now being sacrificed for his conquest of Ukrainian land.
“In the past, the conscripts from Donetsk and Luhansk were used as expendable material, but now it’s the Russians,” military analyst Kirill Mikhailov told iStories of the growing conflict between Kremlin-backed forces in Ukraine’s occupied territories. “They can’t fight any other way. If the approach does not fundamentally change, which I doubt, Russian conscripts will continue to die this way.”