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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
Andrei is the new Ghost of Kiev. A character for the naive.
it’s possible he didn’t mean ‘literally’ every single person was wiped out. But the vast majority
I loved that guy!
So did former Illinois Republican Congressman, hand-picked (by Nancy Pelosi? by Lynn Cheney? by both?) January 6 Committee member, and current CNN Senior Political Commentator Adam Kinzinger:
https://projects.propublica.org/politwoops/tweet/1497284272260059139
We sure live in interesting times. And they keep getting interestinger and interestinger.
Early on. Russian battlefield communications are atrocious. Their COMSEC is even worse. The leaders have learned the lesson. They don’t seem to be using their phones to stay in contact with their commands. That means they are frequently out of communication with those commands. Troops in the field are not supposed to have cell phones, but they obtain them anyway. It’s the only way to make contact with folks back home.
Vladimir has been selecting for loyalty, not competence, and he’s been doing it for a couple of decades now.
That’s all the Russians have. They do not have any training for reserve soldiers, sailors, or pilots. There is no once a month, or weeks of summer training for reservists, much less TDY for reserve pilots and their air crews or mechanics.
The degree of certitude regarding “Vladimir”‘s selection process thereof that emanates from your comment above is quite impressive.
Is it based on anything other than what you wish were true, however?
It is surprising there are not more instances of real-time reports. communication tech is ubiquitous.
Whatever Russian soldiers may think about the righteousness of the cause, they know with certainty that they are badly used, poorly supported and under-supplied. Soldiers bitching is a pretty timeless, universal phenomenon. Those soldiers have much more justification for bitching than most.
Tactics, tech and strategies aside, this horror show seems to be more about which side can better endure.
One of my points is that he’s not just a survivor, but a two-time sole survivor. However he did it — perhaps hiding in a burned out tank, or simply deserting — you’d think many others would have figured it out by now.
Okay, but if he’s not speaking literally, we have to take what he says as not literally true either. ‘Man, I don’t know how I survived. I’m the only one of my group still alive.’ And ‘My brigade doesn’t exist — it is just gone.’
Maybe his group was only ten men, and maybe his brigade all deserted. But if so, then the carnage and destruction is all relative, too.
They made an attack on multiple fronts without sufficient logistics to support them. They got stacked up on the road to Kiev and Ukrainian special forces went hunting fuel trucks on their tenuous line of supply with light antitank weapons. As a result, when the Russians ran, they had to abandon a large quantity of their armor and IFVs. It is common after the fact to pick out the things that went wrong. I’ll pose you a challenge: what did they do right?
On the other hand, there are the Ukrainians. They were unprepared for the attack in 2014. They got busy and got ready for the attack in 2022. All things considered, they did pretty well.
As far as incompetence in the officer corps goes, Putin changes commanders more often than he changes his socks. Clearly he thinks their incompetent, no?
Do you truly expect to be taken seriously as a result of your posting sophomoric stuff like the above, or are you simply after collecting “likes” from your resident co-“thinkers” and stuff?
Let’s just say he’s today’s Gowron and call it a day.
I don’t care. I’m satisfied to point out that Putin is a fool, that his lackeys are incompetent buffoons, and that his “special operation” has reduced his country to a level somewhere in the vicinity of Iran and North Korea.
Much depends on the socks.
And since Putin is the one who picks the commanders, what does that say about Putin?
I found it interesting to hear what Iosif Prigozhin and Farkhad Akhmedov had to say about Putin. And to hear what Max Katz had to say about what they had to say.
Is it similar to what Worf and Sisko said about Gowron?
The real culprit is the one who green-lit this goat rodeo.
I saw that earlier. The two of them need to remember to stay away from windows on the upper floors of buildings.
The thing is, if Putin does that to them, that confirms for any doubters (and Russian apoliticals) that the conversation was real and that he feels vulnerable.
Or he might not have them killed to cover up the vulnerability that he still has.
Yup. It’s not easy being the czar of the Russkie Mir. You’ve got to decide whether you’re better off killing your enemies or letting them live, and then whether to use an open window, an unfortunate death in the war zone, or novichok. Decisions, decisions.
But if you’re going to have them killed somehow, because you’re weak, make sure to use a method that doesn’t make you appear weak.
That this is the level of thinking about Putin and Russia shows how little westerners know about Russia or about geostratgic thinking. Is it any wonder the rest of the world is shifting so rapidly against western interests? Is it any wonder other countries are lining up to join BRICS? Is it any wonder that the balancing coalition that would be easy to form against Chinese expansion will not form because of feckless idiots who have no idea of reality. A bunch of incompetent, moralistic retards.
I would be surprised there was reception.
What’s so sophomoric? He didn’t mean it literally. It was an exaggeration to make a point.
There was a time after the liberation of the Kharkiv region that one side or the other, I disremember which, made known that it was going to shut down the cell towers for a few days while it did some secret reshuffling. But mostly the cell phone services have been allowed to operate. Neither side wants to give up cell phone communication entirely.
This temporary disabling of cell phone service was just in the area north of Donetsk, not along the entire front.