A new video shows Russian troops complaining that their commanders send them to slaughter and leave the wounded to rot rather than issue evacuation orders.
“We are abandoned. It looks so. Our command provides false information,” a soldier in the video says.
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The video, shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, by Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, shows a group of Russian soldiers sitting in cramped quarters and complaining about their commanders and their provisions.
"... found a can of stewed meat, diluted it with water from the Dnipro and drank it for a week not to starve to death."
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) December 1, 2023
More Russian soldiers revealed details of life on the front line in the Kherson direction. They say that Russian defense ministry has abandoned them, there is… pic.twitter.com/RYn1AynK8h
A soldier in the video recounts how his comrades found a can of stewed meat, diluted it with water from the Dnipro River and drank it for a week so as not to starve to death.
The Russian soldiers say that they have no documentary evidence that they are even at war.
In the video, a soldier opens up his military document, and shows that the third page, where his contract is supposed to be, is blank.
And if there's no record of the soldiers, their wives get hung up on if they call the government about their husbands.
Meanwhile, the soldiers in the video, who say they haven't received their pay, buy everything at their own expense – including, food, medicine and uniforms.
“I treat people with medicine at my own expense,” a soldier says.
Another soldier says: “So we take out the wounded from under mortar fire and other shooting fights on personal transport. Personal transportation is fueled with our own money. That is, we either collect money from the brigade for gasoline and oil among other things, or we get money from our wives, as we have no money and our salaries do not come. So we're simply taking the last of the money from home,” the soldier says.
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Kyiv Post could not independently verify the video.
While it’s difficult to be certain of the numbers, secret Pentagon estimates of Russian Federation losses, entering the public domain in April 2023 via the Discord gamer network, put casualties at that time at about 40,000 dead and 110,000 severely wounded.
The Ukrainian open-source claim a month later, was some 25 percent more than the US internal estimate.
Meanwhile, daily Russian losses from so-called “meat assaults” on Avdiivka are approaching World War I levels. Imperial Russia lost about 1.8 million soldiers, or on average 1,100 men a day during World War I. Today it is losing approximately 900 soldiers every 24 hours and sometimes more.
“And yet, no thoughts of getting out of Ukraine and refusing to participate in the war,” Gerashchenko writes.
The video seems to further confirm intercepted calls that show parts of the Russian army are poorly provisioned, badly motivated and generally treated as cannon fodder.
“They just brought us in, threw us out in the woods and told us to dig and not to go anywhere from this strip because a bird [drone] might fly in and drop something on our heads” a Russian prisoner of war told Kyiv Post in an earlier interview.
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