Mick Hartley

Owen Matthews in the Spectator – ‘More than half our squad were executed’: Inside Russia’s rotten army:

For a more complete depiction of the reality of the war in Ukraine from the Russian side, take a look at the feature-length documentary Russians at War, available on YouTube. This extraordinary film was made by the Canadian-Russian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova, who got herself unofficially embedded with a frontline infantry company fighting in Donbas after a chance encounter on a train with a solider. The picture that emerges as Trofimova follows the unit from the spring to autumn of 2023 is of a rag-tag force of undisciplined, reluctant civilians who have mostly signed up only for the money. All are, notionally, volunteers desperate enough to risk their lives for a signing bounty. But many speak of their desperation, their revulsion at the war, and of the corruption and ineptitude of their commanders.

‘We are people with broken fates,’ complains one private who has just returned from the front lines. ‘We were dumped, then got surrounded. Out of our battalion of 900 just 300 made it.’…

Trofimova’s film was shot in 2023. But by all accounts the situation in the Russian army in Ukraine has deteriorated dramatically since then. Storm V, a Telegram blog that reports from the Storm ‘penal/volunteer’ battalion fighting near Pokrovsk, reported in a 14 February post that the unit – made up mostly of released prisoners – lacked ‘even the simplest armour, helmets, masks, generators, magazines for machine-guns’. The unit was regularly chosen for frontline duty because ‘they are told, “You know both cold and hunger, so go ahead, you are more prepared for a life of survival.”’ Commanders, according to the anonymous (and unverified) author of the blog, openly talk of ‘meat assaults’ – the practice of throwing infantry forward into the drone-saturated ‘death zone’ between the two armies. ‘On all fronts [Storm V] are at the forefront of the attack,’ says the blogger. ‘They are not given medals, those are received by those who follow.’

Footage of Russian soldiers being punished for drunkenness and desertion by being taped naked to trees in the freezing cold, then being whipped or punched by officers, appear regularly on Russian social media. This month Denis Kolesnikov, a junior sergeant in the 1435th Regiment, posted a video blog where he explained that he deserted his unit because commanders were demanding bribes not to send men to the front lines. ‘Over half of our squad, about 50 people, were executed by commanders,’ claimed Kolesnikov, blogging from Russia, not from Ukrainian captivity. ‘Everyone must pay money to commanders. When we line up, everyone is told how much they owe. Each person was told to pay from one to three million rubles [£10,000 to £30,000]… not to go to the contact line. As soon as money runs out, they get sent there or killed.’….

In Iraq and Afghanistan I did 13 official journalistic ‘embeds’ with various frontline US and British units between 2001 and 2005 – including the US Third Marine Corps during heavy fighting in Fallujah. The extreme professionalism and discipline of the British and American armies, even under fire, was hugely impressive. The contrast with the chaotic, corrupt, amateurish and utterly unwilling Russian army that is fighting in Ukraine could not be starker. Putin’s forces may command deadly missiles, long-range drones and a modern air-force. And on the ground massed artillery and successive meat-waves of men recruited as cannon fodder may grind slowly and bloodily forward. But a threat to Nato? Not in a million years.

I’m surprised he doesn’t mention the BBC’s The Zero Line: Inside Russia’s War, which I watched last night – a very powerful expose of the scarcely credible brutality of the Russian army, with soldiers executed by commanders and tortured for dissent.