1/ When COVID meets mobilisation: newly mobilised Russian soldiers attached to the 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division have contracted COVID-19 en masse and are now locked in a train for quarantine, without medical care or ventilation. Translation follows: ⬇️
2/ "We are mobilised military personnel of the Taman Division [the 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division], called up on 26 September 2022. Receiving our papers on the following morning, we were deprived of the opportunity to properly equip ourselves, even at our own expense.
3/ Directly on joining the Taman Division we received old uniforms and things like bags. On the 29th we joined the unit in which we are still. After boarding [our train], our unit was sent to the south of Russia, where it stayed for a few days without a definite objective.
4/ At the moment, we are moving back to the north. From the first days, a difficult situation with acute respiratory diseases arose in our unit.
5/ Since we were forced to sleep on the floor and wait for our departure at the station for more than 10 hours, at the moment there are far more sick personnel than healthy ones. I would say that absolutely everyone is sick.
6/ Personally I lost my [sense of] taste and smell. The same symptoms can be detected in others, which allows us to assume a coronavirus infection. There is no medical care in the unit. No one is going to treat us.
7/ Among us are people with chronic diseases, whom the military commands have mobilised without any [medical] examination. In part, we have witnessed cases of heart attacks. From our own sources, it is known that our unit has decided to isolate for a two-week quarantine.
8/ The quarantine is in the same train, where the temperature of the air in the carriage is so high that sweat is pouring from us. Although there is some ventilation at the gangway connectors [between the carriages].
9/ In a week of being on this train, we have never seen either the bosses nor the doctors. We do not want to suffer any serious injury, we are not going to sit in this infected carriage.
10/ If our commanders attack us, we will give our problems to the public without disclosure of any confidential information."
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1/ A Russian soldier says that only the "marginalised" – drug addicts, the homeless and the destitute – are joining the Russian army these days . He says that the war continues because people in Russia profit from it and that its aim is to "dominate and humiliate" Ukraine. ⬇️
2/ Former Wagner soldier Ruslan from Dagestan, who is now serving under contract to the Russian Ministry of Defence, tells a friend that many soldiers lack motivation because the goals and reasons for what's happening are unclear to them.
3/ "You ask questions that I don’t have answers to, because even when you ask yourself these questions, you ask yourself: why the fuck am I here? You're trying to find an answer in your head, but there's no answer."
1/ A shadow war is being fought over the Russian army's access to Starlink. The Russians face a constant battle with Starlink itself and Ukrainian hackers deactivating their terminals, and obstruction from the Russian customs service holding up grey imports of Starlink devices.⬇️
2/ Starlink is banned from being exported to Russia, but can be obtained unofficially through grey imports from Central Asia and China. Most Starlink terminals used by Russian forces are obtained by volunteers and shipped across Russia's southern land borders.
3/ However, they are vulnerable to disruption by Starlink itself, which periodically disables terminals located in Russian-held territory, they are targeted by hackers, and the very slow and cumbersome Russian customs process holds up imports for long periods.
1/ When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the town of Irpin, just west of Kyiv, was the closest that Russia reached to the capital. Its soldiers targeted Christian facilities in the town, destroying buildings and burning Ukrainian-language Bibles in the street. ⬇️
2/ One of the buildings targeted by the Russians was the Field Ministries Training Centre of @MissionEurasia, an international Christian organisation based in Wheaton, Illinois. The group trains missionaries throughout the former Soviet Union and provides humanitarian aid.
3/ After the Russian army reached Irpin on 6 March 2022, the Mission Eurasia training centre was reportedly taken over by Russian special forces, who used it as a barracks and stacked Bibles to barricade windows.
1/ 790 Russian soldiers from a single unit have died at Pokrovsk, according to a Russian combat medic, with another 900 having deserted according to leaked figures. Another soldier from the same unit says that losses are running at 80-90%. ⬇️
2/ The unnamed medic says that she is serving with the 39th Separate Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade (military unit 35390) at Pokrovsk. She describes how she was on the front line with "young guys" aged 19 or 20:
3/ "They were running around, and we had dugouts, I think. And I say No, no, fuck that. They ran, in short, into a Ukrainian minefield and it just tore them apart. Well, it's not like they were 200, dead, none of them died. Well, they were just blown up really badly.
1/ How does a false report that Kupyansk has been captured by Russia come to be delivered on camera to Vladimir Putin? A Russian warblogger blames a military reporting process that prizes low-value metrics, rewards blind optimism, and eliminates nuance. ⬇️
"The transfer of operational information from the bottom up in the Russian Ministry of Defence and the Russian Armed Forces is accompanied by a consistent transformation of the initial data as it moves up the chain of command."
3/ "This process is not a system, but an established practice and is based on stable semantic and organisational mechanisms.
At the level of a motorised rifle/airborne/assault platoon, initial observations are recorded in formulations that imply the completion of the action.
1/ A sign of how things are now on the Russian front lines: Russian volunteers declare success after raising enough money to buy a truckload of body bags. ⬇️
2/ From the 'Good staff' Telegram channel:
"Our next item to collect is body bags for our fallen comrades.
As hard as it is for us, and it's always hard for me to write about it, the guys have an urgent need for them."
3/ "It would be great to buy 1,000 of them. They're giving us that amount at 171 rubles each...
Friends, remember we started a fundraiser for bags for our fallen comrades.
We managed to collect and purchase 500 bags. The bags were purchased and delivered to the guys.