Yesterday the Washington Post had a story about an elite Russian brigade and how it was gradually demolished over the course of the invasion of Ukraine. Last night the NY Times published a very lengthy and detailed story looking at the entire Russia war effort and how, thanks to Putin’s own arrogance, it became a nightmare for the soldiers sent there. The story opens on one brigade full of recently mobilized soldiers who’d been assured they would never be sent to fight on the front lines. Naturally, that was a lie.
Fumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training.
Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from half a century ago and virtually nothing to eat, they said. Russia had been at war most of the year, yet its army seemed less prepared than ever. In interviews, members of the brigade said some of them had barely fired a gun before and described having almost no bullets anyway, let alone air cover or artillery. But it didn’t frighten them too much, they said. They would never see combat, their commanders had promised.
Only when the shells began crashing around them, ripping their comrades to pieces, did they realize how badly they had been duped.
Flung to the ground, a drafted Russian soldier named Mikhail recalled opening his eyes to a shock: the shredded bodies of his comrades littering the field. Shrapnel had sliced open his belly, too. Desperate to escape, he said, he crawled to a thicket of trees and tried to dig a ditch with his hands.
Of the 60 members of his platoon near the eastern Ukrainian town of Pavlivka that day in late October, about 40 were killed, said Mikhail, speaking by phone from a military hospital outside Moscow. Only eight, he said, escaped serious injury.
Aleksandr, another soldier from the 155th who survived that attack, told the Times from a Russian hospital: “Legs, guts. I mean, meat. Just meat. I know it sounds terrible, but you can’t describe it any other way. People were turned into hamburger.”
How did this happen? According to the Times, which spoke to numerous people including longtime friends of Putin, it started with the Russian leader’s own hubris.
In interviews, Putin associates said he spiraled into self-aggrandizement and anti-Western zeal, leading him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in near total isolation, without consulting experts who saw the war as pure folly. Aides and hangers-on fueled his many grudges and suspicions, a feedback loop that one former confidant likened to the radicalizing effect of a social-media algorithm. Even some of the president’s closest advisers were left in the dark until the tanks began to move. As another longtime confidant put it, “Putin decided that his own thinking would be enough.”…
People who know Mr. Putin say he is ready to sacrifice untold lives and treasure for as long as it takes, and in a rare face-to-face meeting with the Americans last month the Russians wanted to deliver a stark message to President Biden: No matter how many Russian soldiers are killed or wounded on the battlefield, Russia will not give up.
The exact number of Russian soldiers killed is unknown but various estimates range from 20,000 to nearly 100,000. Compare that to the deadliest year of the Iraq War, 2007, when the US lost 904 soldiers. Whatever the actual losses so far, Putin is said to be willing to see several hundred thousand more of his own troops die in the effort.
The story catalogs a long list or Russian failures of every type imaginable. They failed to take out Ukrainian air defenses (outdated maps and failure to cover their own attack jets), they failed to move tanks quickly into Ukraine (bad roads and constant ambushes), they even failed to provide food for their own troops who were reduced to looting Ukrainian apartments for supplies. All of this quickly resulted in a fighting force that was not eager to fight.
Some Russian troops panicked, and even resorted to self-sabotage. One Pentagon intelligence report said that Russian military drivers were poking holes in their gas tanks, disabling their own vehicles to avoid going into battle.
The commander of a Ukrainian tank repair depot said some 30 Russian T-80 tanks in seemingly perfect condition were taken and delivered to him at the beginning of the war. When his mechanics inspected, they found sand had been poured into the fuel tanks, rendering them inoperable.
One of the Russians biggest blunders came when soldiers started using regular cell phones to call home from inside Ukraine. Those calls were routed through Ukrainian cell towers which meant the government could listen in to their calls and gather information. That made it easy to pass the info along to Ukrainian troops who could target those soldiers and their units often within a matter of hours.
While all of this was happening, Russian media was overflowing with propaganda about Russian successes. The FSB was giving the media scoops while the actual reporters had no idea what was going on in Ukraine. Gradually some Russian military bloggers who had their own sources began to catch on to what was really happening.
“The collective system of circular, mutual self-deception is the herpes of the Russian Army,” the pro-Russian militia commander Aleksandr Khodakovsky wrote on Telegram in June.
The mounting failures drove a cadre of pro-Russian military bloggers to a boiling point. While still cheerleaders for the war, they began to openly criticize Russia’s performance.
“I’ve been keeping quiet for a long time,” the blogger Yuri Podolyaka said in May, after hundreds of soldiers died in a river crossing. “Due to stupidity — I emphasize, because of the stupidity of the Russian command — at least one battalion tactical group was burned, possibly two.”
There is much more to the story including sections dealing with the failures of the Wagner mercenary group and the retreat from Kherson. You’ll need to set aside some time to read it all but the overall picture is one of Putin’s personal arrogance and his continued unwillingness to admit the invasion has been a disaster for himself and for Russia.
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