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‘My Brigade No Longer Exists’
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, sometimes called a ‘Special Operation’ by Russian leadership, has created an existential crisis…for Ukraine.
It is an existential crisis for Russian conscripts that are on the front lines of brutal trench warfare. Russian leaders claim that Ukraine belongs to Russia. Ukrainians do not agree with that claim. Regardless of all the claims made by those inside and outside of Ukraine, regardless of the side they advocate for, this is the largest land war in Europe since WWII.
The Russian government claims they have lost 6,000 troops in this war. Western military analysts say Russian losses are around 200,000 wounded and killed.
Russia has hundreds of thousands of reservists. That is true, but those reservists served for two years as conscripts and after leaving Russian forces, they do not receive any more training. The Wagner Group (pronounced Vagner) has been emptying Russian prisons and sending inmates to the front lines. Along with aged conscripts, they are nothing more than cannon fodder.
Members of Ricochet seem to be divided into two groups as they watch this war from the sidelines. There are those that want Ukraine to surrender and there are those that want Russia to stop their invasion. A cynic might say that there are those that want Ukraine to lose and those that want Russia to lose.
One can muse on Ukrainian corruption, but Russia has its own corruption problems. Russian military procurement to include inflated numbers of troops and the supplies they need may have been siphoned away into military leadership bank accounts. One should not forget the old Soviet Union saying: They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.
Ukraine and Russia will have their good days and their bad days on the battlefield. The Wagner mercenaries are struggling. Their promise of a death benefit has become, no body, no payment. Russian families of conscripts from Moscow and St. Petersburg receive a higher death benefit than those from the rural areas of Russia.
Drones may be changing the battlefield, but cell phones are giving some insight into those who are fighting on the front lines.
At the end of February, Ivan, who lives in the settlement of Volchikha in Siberia’s Altai region, got a phone call from his best friend, a mobilized soldier named Andrei who was serving in Ukraine. Although the two had been in regular contact since Andrei was called up, it had been more than a week since they had last spoken.
“I’ll never forget that phone call,” Ivan told RFE/RL. “It was the first time I’d heard his voice trembling: ‘Man, I don’t know how I survived. I’m the only one of my group still alive.’ A grown man sobbed for nearly 10 minutes while he told how his comrades were killed before his eyes, including some who were just 20 years old.”
For several months, Russia and Ukraine have been locked in intense trench warfare along a front line of more than 120 kilometers in Ukraine’s Donbas region, including cities whose names have become globally known, such as Bakhmut, Avdiyivka, and Maryinka.
After that phone call, Andrei’s unit was sent to more intense fighting near Avdiyivka, on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk. “On March 3, they were thrown into an attack against a fortified road near Avdiyivka,” Ivan said. “Then I didn’t hear from him for 10 days.”
“He called on March 13, directly from the front,” Ivan added. “The call lasted seven minutes. I never heard such horror in anyone’s voice before in my life — ‘My brigade doesn’t exist — it is just gone.'”
Andrei, 32, was called up in the fall of 2022, shortly after President Vladimir Putin announced a military mobilization in the wake of a stunning Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northeast that sent Russian forces reeling in confusion and resulted in the liberation of about 12,000 square kilometers. He served as a draftee in the Russian Army more than a decade ago.
He spent the first three months after he was mobilized at a base in the western Siberian city of Omsk, Ivan says. “During that whole time, he fired one magazine of bullets,” Ivan recounted. “They stood in formation and marched around.”
Next, his unit was sent to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea for “territorial defense.” But only one month later, they were hurriedly sent to the partially occupied Zaporizhzhya region on the southern Ukrainian mainland.
“There they spent a week sitting in trenches and then they were shipped in the direction of Vuhledar,” Ivan said, referring to a coal-mining town in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. “In Vuhledar, it was a concrete mess — fortifications and trenches. Everyone knows the meat grinder there was outside Vuhledar in late February. The 155th Naval Infantry Brigade was literally mowed down there. My friend’s company was seconded to them in a reorganization.”
The 155th Naval Infantry Brigade has been reconstituted about eight times since the invasion of Ukraine began.
Radio Free Europe changed the names of those involved in the phone calls because Moscow is busy hunting down those who are receiving cell calls from those on the front lines to include families trying to find their sons. The most important place in the world for the grunts fighting in the trenches is their trench. It is not the lofty words from Moscow and Washington DC.
Published in Military
Whether Ukraine has a corrupt government is irrelevant. Every government in the world has some form of corruption, including our own. The invasion by Russia is (1) immoral and (2) contrary to the interests of a stable Europe and therefore the United States. Russia must not win, and if they do must pay a heavy price.
i.e, it must be pyrrhic.
Exactly!
Pyrrhic to everyone but the Ukrainians, I suppose.
I thought you were referring to a possible Russian victory. Pyrrhic to the Russians. I don’t know who else you mean.
Well, if it’s a Russian victory, I don’t think the Ukrainians will be saying “But at least it’s only pyrrhic!”
Did I read his right? Andrei was soldier who was the sole survivor of two consecutive massive battles, along with his cell phone, and each time he’s in the thick of the destruction after the battle, twice he takes time to call is friend 4,000 miles away . No first aid kit running from person to person, no searching for food and water, no moving to join other units.
How was he even allowed a cell phone in combat? Wouldn’t the signals be used to direct fire upon you and your unit?
I certainly hope so!
I am sure he only had what he was allowed and did what he was allowed.
They’re close, okay?
And that’s how he was the sole survivor of two major battles.
I’m hoping he’s an agent for Ukraine.
I’m hoping he exists.
Edited to add:
Radio Liberty does propaganda. That is literally their job. Whether they’re on the side of the angels or not, they aren’t going to be constrained by anything as pedestrian as mere facts.
Yes, they would. Which is why Russian military personnel, as per a decree signed by Putin in May 2020, have been prohibited from having cell phones and such while on duty.
Is it possible that some soldiers would risk the disciplinary consequences of violating the rule? Sure.
Is it possible that some of their superiors would risk the disciplinary consequences of failing to enforce the rule? I suppose.
But what’s the likelihood that the scofflaws’ fellow soldiers would tolerate it, given the dangers to them? I’m thinking mighty low. I’m thinking that, at the very least, that cell phone would not be long for this world.
I don’t know. What are the chances that someone who survived the Hiroshima bomb would then travel to Nagasaki and survive that one too?
https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/tsutomu-yamaguchi-man-who-survived-atomic-bombs/
It’s Radio Free Bulls###. What did you expect?
Pointing out that the odds of “Andrei”‘s story being true are as long as those of someone surviving two nuclear blasts is very detrimental to the cause of boosting Ukrainians’ morale, mister! What are you, a Putin-lover or sumptin’?
Amusingly, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on the Russian law banning on-duty military personnel cell phones at the time:
https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-bans-armed-forces-members-from-carrying-electronic-devices-gadgets/30598888.html
Cell phone use by soldiers has been increasingly restricted by the Russians. That doesn’t mean there still isn’t a lot of cell phone use.
It still seems to happen a lot. This isn’t the first such report.
I dunno, that sounds remarkably similar to General Pickett’s (alleged) reply to Lee at Gettysburg after “Pickett’s Charge” failed:
A number of Russian Generals were successfully targeted by their cell phone use.
People on Ricochet have asserted only, oh, a zillion times that today’s young American isn’t made of the same stuff as the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, or fought the battle of Leyte Gulf. By now it should be equally obvious that today’s Russian soldier isn’t the battle hardened, stoic superhuman who fought the battles of Kursk or Stalingrad either. On both sides, we have young men who grew up with cell phones and Playstations.
Reportedly, via Ukrainian sources. IOW, grain of salt and all that.
There’s a Twitter account (Czech origin, unambiguously pro-Ukraine) I follow that tries really hard to keep meticulous track of such Russian casualties (not just generals, but officers). According to that source, the number of confirmed Russian generals killed as of March 1 (i.e. a year or so into the war) is … 4, with a further 14 suspected to have been killed.
Here’s the source, if you or anyone else are interested:
https://twitter.com/KilledInUkraine/status/1630883232718700545
If they’re getting their “soldiers” from prisons nowadays, their current “generals” may not be very impressive either.
No, RFE is pointing out that Andrei is the Typhoid Mary of the Russian forces.
Heh.
Andrei is a survivor. Once the attrition rate gets to a certain point the combat effectiveness of a unit diminishes and the new conscripts are pushed into the front line to become the point of the spear. Andrei has learned the hard lessons the hard way. He will do whatever it takes to survive now and that is doing as little as possible.
Andrei was called up ten years after leaving a two-year active-duty commitment. Russian reservists do no regular training unlike Finnish or American reservists.
There is a far greater incentive for Ukrainians that are fighting for their own country than there is for Andrei who comes from Siberia.
I assume you’re talking about the Army/AF/Navy Reserves & the Guard. There is a reserve called the “Individual ready Reserve.” When I separated from the AF, I was in the IRR for a couple of years. I had to keep my uniforms in good shape, as well as myself. Once a year we were called up to a nearby ANG base for weigh in, etc. The ANG/AF reserve used it as a recruiting event to try and get us to sign up for the Guard/Reserve. My IRR commitment ended a few months before the US activated for Gulf I.
I suspect that the Russian reserves you mention are analogous to our IRR.
As a general rule, on average, there can be no doubt whatsoever about that.
However, …
There is no shortage of recent (as in, during the past few months) videos of Ukrainian (National Guard? Police?) forcefully “recruiting” men off the street. Wrestling them down and then shoving them into the “recruitment” van, if need be, and such.
Late last year/early this year, the Hungarian government sent a strong warning to the Ukrainian government about the latter’s seeming focus on “recruiting” men from Zakarpattia Oblast (a region with a substantial Hungarian-ethnic population) and sending them straight to Bakhmut. Reportedly, the Ukrainians got the message.
And so on.
Things are … fluid. And complicated. In ways that quite often confound expectations that are based on general/on average type rules.