From the MT:
“Russia
Sends Army Recruits to Fight in Ukraine After Just Days of Training”
(Army
conscripts are seen at the Yegorshino regional assembly station before
departing for service with the Russian Armed Forces.)
Less than two
weeks after joining the army, Ivan was on the frontlines of Russia’s offensive
in eastern Ukraine and taking part in attacks on Ukrainian positions. Ivan, 31, who requested anonymity to protect
his safety, said he received just five days of training before being
transferred to Ukraine and flung into combat. “There was a soldier in our company who didn’t
know how a machine gun works. So I
taught that guy how to disassemble and assemble a machine gun. I
wouldn’t want to be next to him in battle. How can you fight like that?” he
told The Moscow Times.
Providing
minimal training to new recruits appears to be increasingly common in the
Russian army as the war in Ukraine approaches its sixth month and high casualty
rates combine with a lack of general mobilization to generate serious manpower
shortages. A lack of knowledge leaves
soldiers without the necessary combat skills to survive on the battlefield,
according to military analysts and human rights activists. “A week [of
training] is nothing — for a soldier, it is a direct path to a hospital or a
body bag,” independent military analyst Pavel Luzin told The Moscow Times. According
to Russia’s Defense Ministry website, an intensive four-week combined arms
training with a "survival" course is “essential” for anyone who signs
a contract with the Russian army. The program takes a total of 240 hours and
includes shooting, throwing grenades and a study of military tactics.
(Russian
servicemen on a train in Ukraine.)
However, amid
the war in Ukraine, it appears training standards are not being observed,
according to Sergei Krivenko, director of human rights group Citizen. Army.
Law. that provides legal assistance to Russian soldiers. “I’ve been regularly approached by parents
whose children signed a [military] contract and ended up in Ukraine just a week
later,” Krivenko told The Moscow Times.
Ivan signed a
three-month contract with the Defense Ministry in April. “When the special military operation started —
although in fact, it is a war — I took it as a personal tragedy,” said Ivan. “I
told myself that I wanted to go there and no one would stop me. I’m a patriot.”
He was soon transferred to a military
base in the Russian city of Belgorod near the border with Ukraine. Less than
two weeks later, he found himself on the frontlines. “After all the medical
check-ups, they asked me if I was ready to go to the military base the day
after tomorrow. They trained us for five days, we waited for another five days
for a force rotation and then we went to [combat] positions,” he said in a
phone interview. In the five days Ivan and other soldiers were waiting to be
deployed to Ukraine, they carried out some informal training exercises. “Of
course, it was not enough,” he said.
Similar
accounts of new recruits receiving minimal training have appeared in Russian
media in recent weeks. “I was shocked.
Some have not properly held a machine gun in their hands, have never seen real
tanks in person, and they’re leaving for the frontline in a couple of days,”
one anonymous soldier said last month in an interview with the BBC Russian
Service.
Yevgeny
Chubarin, 24, was killed in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region just four days after being
transferred to the Belgorod military base on a three-month contract with the
Russian military, independent news outlet Mediazona reported last month. “There
was no training,” his mother Nina Chubarina told Mediazona. ”They arrived, got
a uniform and a machine gun — and that’s it, go ahead.” While most Russian men
have completed at least a year of compulsory military service in the Russian
Armed Forces, training is still seen as essential to update and refresh their
skills, which may be many years out of date.
Under Russian
law, conscripts can't be sent into combat unless they have at least four months
of training. The same logic should apply to those who sign a contract with the
military to go to Ukraine, according to expert Luzin. According to Ivan, the
five days of training they did receive was “intense.” All soldiers were treated the same during the
training regardless of experience. The majority had not been in a war zone
before, according to Ivan, although there were some who had battlefield
experience, including in Russia’s military campaigns in Syria and the North
Caucasus republic of Chechnya. “We were
at the training ground from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. We practiced combat skills,
seizing and storming buildings, all-around defense, working in combat teams,
field medicine, evacuation and treatment of wounded soldiers. The focus was on
those skills you needed for your position — a machine gunner, a grenade launcher
operator and so on,” said Ivan.
While such
basic instruction may be enough to allow soldiers to carry out simple tasks in
combat, military experts told The Moscow Times military training should be much
broader. “There’s a lot that needs to be learned in terms of coordination and
cooperation with a team. And it’s quite time-consuming,” said Samuel
Cranny-Evans, a military analyst at the London-based Royal United Services
Institute think tank.
High casualty
rates mean the Russian military is likely losing cohesion, according to
experts, with training deficiencies only exacerbating this problem. The army has begun to mix soldiers from
different units, according to Dara Massicot, a senior researcher at the
U.S.-based RAND think tank and a former senior analyst at the Pentagon. “The
soldiers don’t know the commanders, they don’t know where their unit is as it's
fighting in the field,” Massicot told The Moscow Times. “Plus, there’s a lack
of specialists [in the Russian army]. This means if some equipment breaks down,
they simply cannot repair it,” she added.
Despite the
situation on the battlefield, one of the motivations for people signing up to
fight is apparently money, with the military offering salaries up to four times
higher than local averages. Ivan said he
was paid over 240,000 rubles ($3,794) per month. Independent Russian
journalists have used publicly available information to confirm the deaths of
almost 5,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine. However, the actual death toll is
likely to be much higher and analysts have estimated the true figure to be well
over 10,000. The Russian Defense
Ministry last updated its official death toll in late March, with 1,351
confirmed fatalities. Ivan suffered shrapnel wounds in his leg and arm while
fighting near the northeastern Ukrainian city of Izyum in late April, and was
transferred to a hospital in Russia. He said last week that he was still
recovering from his wounds at home in Moscow. “The problem is that the planners of the
operation assumed the Ukrainians would not resist them in this way, so they
didn’t think about the manpower and now they are just filling the gaps,” said
analyst Massicot. “Essentially it all
means they [the Russian army] are not going to advance quickly anymore.”
^ This shows
that Putin and his Nazi Zs are beyond desperate. Hitler didn’t resort to using
untrained Soldiers until the 6th year of World War 2 while Russia
has resorted to doing the same after only 5 months of War. These untrained and
unmotivated Soldiers are good for Ukraine since they are basically Cannon Fodder
and part of the 30,000 + Russian casualties inside Ukraine. ^
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