1/ Mobilised Russian soldiers fighting near Bakhmut have recorded a video complaining about the brutal and incompetent behaviour of their commander. They reject orders to execute comrades refusing to fight and abandon the wounded, who they say are not being evacuated. ⬇️
2/ In a 4-minute video, a group of at least nine mobilised soldiers who say they are from the "76th Division" – probably the 76th Guards Air Assault Division, a nominally elite paratroop unit – denounce what they call the "criminal" orders of their commander, callsign 'Rostov'.
3/ The date when it was recorded isn't clear, but it's fairly likely that it was made before the 76th Division was very recently transferred from the Donetsk region to prop up the crumbling Russian defensive lines in the Zaporizhzhia region.
4/ In the video, the spokesman for the group says: "We are tired of being silent about this. Tired of enduring it. Tired of losing our comrades. We are a reconnaissance division [sic, probably the 175th Reconnaissance Battalion]. We are from the 76th Division."
5/ "For six months we have fought on the Bakhmut direction, without rest, without leave, without replenishment and trained personnel."
The man says that his unit is "taking heavy casualties, 200s [killed], 300s [wounded] ... because of the thoughtless actions of our command."
6/ "Our command makes them drop, doesn't let them pull out. Corpses are lying on the zero [front] line. The boys are bleeding, they are not evacuated at ground zero."
7/ "In the area of contact with the enemy, there are criminal orders to chase the remnants of people forward to their positions on pain of death, to threaten them with weapons and reprisals. We are not war criminals, we are not going to wipe out our comrades or make them 300s."
8/ The man vows that "I'm not going to follow criminal orders." He condemns his commanders for sending men into battle "with no [artillery] support, no assistance, no infantry support, no provisions going forward in the field."
9/ He says that commanders have no communication with their units and lack information about the situation in the area and the location of the units, which results in loss of life.
10/ "They do not know what is happening in their direction, in their area of responsibility ... There is no communication with the units that are there. Our artillery is sometimes aimed at our positions while Russian soldiers are sitting there."
11/ He says that if the soldiers refuse to follow orders, they are threatened with being shot, executed, thrown in a pit or struck with artillery fired from their own side. The men appeal to senior commanders to suspend 'Rostov' and review the legality of his actions. /end
1/ With voting underway in the Russian presidential elections, the authorities seem to want to make them even more unfair by handing mobilisation orders to election observers at polling stations. ⬇️
2/ Russian Communist Party member Alexander Safronov says that in the Black Sea city of Gelendzhik, military registration and enlistment office employees have been handing mobilisation orders to election observers.
3/ "Another electoral disgrace in Gelendzhik," Safronov writes. "Electoral crooks have involved the military registration and enlistment office - they go to commissions, scare observers, and hand out summonses."
1/ General Sergei Surovikin, who disappeared in apparent disgrace after the Wagner Group's mutiny in June 2023, has been "found another position" with the Commonwealth of Independent States, according to State Duma Deputy and retired Colonel General Viktor Zavarzin. ⬇️
2/ Zavarzin has told the Russian news publication Podem: "[Surovikin] fought well, but the situation has changed.
3/ I know what you know too, that they found him another position, changed it, his chief of staff [General Viktor Afzalov] is fulfilling the commands of the commander-in-chief, he has another position, it's not bad, in the CIS or whatever it's properly called.
1/ Russian sources say that General Surovikin's well-publicised reappearance in Moscow indicates that close allies of Vladimir Putin still regard him as a potentially useful counterweight to an increasingly powerful Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. ⬇️
2/ The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel reports that sources say that Surovikin's reemergence was due to the intervention of two high-ranking Putin allies. One is Sergei Chemezov, the CEO of the defence group Rostec Corporation, and a former KGB agent and high-ranking general.
3/ The other intervenor is said to be Sergey Kiriyenko, a former Russian Prime Minister and the long-serving First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia. It was reportedly at his initiative that the photo of Surovikin and his wife was released.
1/ Half of the soldiers from the mobilised "Leningrad Regiment" are said to have been killed fighting near Bakhmut. Survivors say they were given little equipment or ammunition, and have been maltreated by incompetent officers who sent them into deadly positions. ⬇️
2/ The regiment (formally the 1486th Motor Rifle Regiment) is one of several that have mostly been recruited from St Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad Oblast. It comprises men mobilised from September 2022 onwards, plus volunteers.
3/ According to one of the regiment's members, a man called Dmitry, after mobilisation 1,700 men were sent for two months to a military training camp at Privetninskoye, a village in the Vyborg district of the Leningrad Oblast. Now, he says, "half are no longer alive."
1/ The Union of Soldiers' Widows of Russia claims that compensation payments for husbands killed in Ukraine are providing an "economic salvation for the Russian countryside". It praises the economic benefits of the "soldiers' coffins" provided by the state. ⬇️
2/ The group is fanatically pro-Putin and pro-war. A recent post on its Telegram channel condemns the upcoming Russian presidential election as too costly and says: "Putin is more than a president. [He is] a tsar, emperor. Russia doesn't need elections. Russia needs Putin."
3/ The 'Moscow Against Mobilisation' Telegram channel highlights a post from the group, which discusses how dead soldiers' compensation payments (known euphemistically as 'coffins') are allegedly transforming the impoverished communities where their families live.
1/ The floor of an underground passageway in Belgorod is being dismantled in another fit of Russian anti-Ukrainian paranoia. The passageway, which is under construction, was to have a floor of yellow and blue tiles (perhaps reflecting the colours of the city's flag). ⬇️
2/ However, this prompted complaints on social media due to the similarities to the yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag. This "dangerous combination", as the Baza Telegram channel puts it, is now being removed hastily.
3/ It's yet another instance of the colours yellow and blue becoming a lightning rod for Russian nationalist paranoia and anti-Ukrainian sentiment. Many more examples in the thread below: