1/ A trainload of Russian soldiers is reported to have mutinied after nearly suffering frostbite in an unheated train. According to the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel:
2/ "On 13 January a four-car train (about 200 soldiers) stopped at Ulusarka station in the Lipetsk region.
The soldiers almost got frostbite on the way to the combat zone, as it was freezing and the train was not heated in any way.
3/ The soldiers refused to continue and demanded 4 tons of coal and water to start a boiler in the train. The police were called in to pacify the soldiers." /end
1/ Members of the European Parliament voted yesterday to support the establishment of a special war crimes tribunal to try Russian President Vladimir Putin and other top Russians. However, 19 MEPs voted against. The Russian 'We can explain' (MO) Telegram channel discusses why. ⬇️
2/ Describing them as "old friends of the Kremlin", MO says that the 19 "were favourites of Russian propaganda who took part in events in Moscow at the expense of the Russian budget." It highlights five individuals in particular.
3/ They include two members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, Gunnar Beck and Maximilian Krah.
2/ "The women ask the local authorities to remove their men from the combat zone. The mobilised men themselves, they said, are now being scattered among different units so that they cannot fight for their rights."
3/ This seems to be the current method of dealing with discontent among the mobilised – split them up and redistribute them individually to other front line units so that they are no longer able to act as a group. /end
(h/t @wartranslated)
1/ Wagner has held a memorial ceremony for Tarimo Nemes Raymond, a Tanzanian student imprisoned in Russia who was killed fighting for Wagner at Bakhmut in October 2022. He is the second African known to have died for Wagner in the Ukraine war. ⬇️
2/ According to the 'Wagner Cargo 200' channel, Tarimo Nemes Raymond initially came to Russia in 2018 with the International Volunteer Forum. He's still listed as a volunteer on the dobru.ru website, with a registration date of 28 September 2018.
3/ Tanzanian sources say that Raymond was a senior member of Tanzania's second-largest political party, the Party for Democracy and Progress (Chadema), and stood unsuccessfully for election to Tanzania's parliament in 2020.
1/ Recent reports have suggested that the Wagner Group has suffered huge casualties among the convicts it has mobilised from penal colonies across Russia. One small illustration of this, according to the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel:
2/ "A source of VChK-OGPU said that out of 270 convicts of one of the Bashkir colonies recruited by the Wagner PMC, 30 people are still alive. "This figure quite accurately reflects the number of losses of convicts – just over 10 per cent survive," the source said."
3/ Meanwhile, Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin has published a video showing him congratulating surviving convicts for enduring "blood, earth, shit and sugar" and completing their contracts and getting pardons. In the video, Prigozhin says:
1/ The Russian army is planning to deal more harshly with dissent and indiscipline from mobilised soldiers by establishing military prisons at bases where the mobilised are being trained and accommodated. ⬇️
2/ Russia's Central Military District has instructed training units to establish detention facilities for personnel who are being disciplined. The move is in response to a request from State Duma deputy Maksim Ivanov, an ex-GRU member, who has taken a hard line on discipline.
3/ As the 7x7 Horizontal Russia Telegram channel reports, in December Ivanov wrote to the Central Military District demanding that it lock up "those mobilized military personnel who "sow discord or behave in an impertinent manner".
1/ Mobilised Russians from Novosibirsk say they have been sent to the front line without food, winter clothing or enough boots, have to buy their own provisions and have been told that if they want weapons they must take them from the Ukrainians. ⬇️
2/ A few days ago, @wartranslated published the video below showing the men complaining about their conditions. Now the independent Russian media outlet Important Stories (iStories) has interviewed one of them.
3/ The unnamed soldier says that he and his comrades are living "like homeless people", barely surviving in terrible conditions on the front line under constant bombardment. Despite this, they are falsely listed as being stationed in the safer 'green zone' in a rear area.