Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ The Russian army is recruiting alcoholics directly from rehab and sending them to the front line, according to a serving Russian soldier, who says they "couldn't even walk, and they're also just plain sick in the head." It highlights how Russia is using 'disposable' men. ⬇️

2/ In the undated video below, an unnamed Russian soldier complains about the latest replenishments in his detachment, who are to be sent to assault squads: "They've got a bunch of fucking cripples. They couldn't even walk, and they're also just plain sick in the head."

3/ If the men refuse, they are badly beaten. The commanders are indifferent to the recruits' condition, despite the gruelling task they face of crossing vast open fields with no cover from Ukrainian artillery and drones:

4/ "What’s up with that guy? How does he manage to get around? Even if he does make it there, he won’t even be able to [fight], you know? And it’s like, "just let him get there".

5/ He says that he personally saw alcoholics being recruited "from a rehab center" in Petrozavodsk, where their bank cards were confiscated and their accounts drained by "the women who processed the paperwork" – likely so-called 'black recruiters'.

6/ "The rest are just cripples, drunks. Even their legs are atrophied a bit from the vodka. There's probably a fuckload of them, about thirty of them."

7/ Russia has been recruiting alcoholics for some time, although they are militarily useless and die quickly on the front line – whether through being killed by the Ukrainians, disposed of by their own side, or simply through their own ill-health.

8/ As the Russian warblogger and journalist Anastasia Kashevarova has noted, a lot of this is due to corruption. Recruiters receive bonuses for signing up men – whether or not they are fit to fight – and the socially marginalised are especially vulnerable.

9/ Men with drinking problems often sign up (or have their signatures forged) while they are drunk, or are intimidated into signing up by being given a choice between the army and one of Russia's notoriously brutal jails.

10/ This highlights how Russia is dealing with its huge manpower losses in Ukraine. As a report from @dossier_center illustrates, summarised in the thread below from @khodorkovsky_en, Russian units need a constant inflow of recruits to replace the dead.

11/ As Kashevarova has highlighted, recruiting alcoholics is counter-productive – they are combat-ineffective and cost the state a lot of money in recruitment bonuses and death compensation payments. However, the Russian army's recruitment incentive structure ignores this.

12/ Russian military recruiters appear to operate not on how effective a recruit will be, but purely on the basis of arbitrary recruitment quotas. As long as the army's recruitment system has found enough men to replenish a depleted assault squad, it has achieved its objective.

13/ The immediate death of every member of that squad and their failure to achieve a military objective is someone else's problem. /end

Source:
t.me/mobilizationne…