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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
Interesting. I think US Army approach, and let me emphasize I’m speculating here based on things I’ve read but can’t verify, would be to disable the enemy communication means and establish your own internal means, as soon as possible. Ukraine may not have the ability to do that to Russia but you would think Russia would do that immediately.
Russia has provided a lot of surprises about things it can’t do. A few days ago we were hearing about a space launch platform that Russia was building in Kazhakstan. Russia was way behind in payments, so Kazhakstan foreclosed on it. (There are other space launch platforms that Russia is still operating there.) One of the problems with the new one that may have diminished the Russian priority in making payments was that one of the main rocket systems that was intended to be launched from there was one that was built in Ukraine.
Ah, here it is:
If you watch the video you will see that I didn’t have this part quite right.
Elon Musk set the Ukrainians up with Starlink almost immediately. Starlink itself doesn’t provide phones, but you can get them through T-Mobile and other providers via Starlink.
I don’t know the status of the Ukrainians and Starlink at present, but their communications with the outside world seem to still be functioning.
Even with Starlink – and perhaps this will show my ignorance on how recent cell service works – but don’t you need cell towers for cell phones?
Here
Looks like I didn’t remember this part very accurately, either. I’m pretty sure it’s the episode I was thinking of.
Ah, that makes sense. I didn’t think of that. Thanks.
Although if they were using Iridium phones, those don’t require any towers at all.