Comments by "R Johansen" (@rjohansen9486) on "Zelensky's Aide Confirms 'West Plans Kyiv's Strategy'; Army Gen 'Secretly' Meets NATO Officials" video.
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Is the Russian condition better than it was during winter?
Calls between Russian soldiers and their loved ones – eavesdropped by Ukraine - reveal reality of war for Kremlin’s forces.
“No one feeds us anything, mum,” he complained. “Our supply is shit, to be honest. We draw water from puddles, then we strain it and drink it.”
Two days before Andrey made his afternoon call back home, the Russian forces had “finally” started firing at Ukrainian positions with phosphorus bombs, he told his mother, but the promises of munitions that could turn the battle had come to nothing.
Andrey reassured his mother, who lives in Kostroma, a city 310 miles north-east of Moscow, that he would be OK. “I always say prayers Mum,” he said. “Every morning.”
It is not known whether those prayers were met. When approached by the Guardian his mother said her son was not with her, before breaking down in tears and putting the phone down.
Others shared with the Guardian, include a conversation on 6 November between a father and the colleagues of his son, Andrei, who had been killed serving in the 35th motorised rifle brigade, 5th company.
“Reinforcements: no; communication: no”, responded a soldier to questions from the grieving parent about the status of the men who had survived a Ukrainian onslaught. “They said we weren’t allowed to retreat. Otherwise, we may be shot.”
In a third intercept from 26 October a soldier in the Donetsk region tells his wife how he had fled with three others from the bloodshed and was contemplating surrender. “I’m in a sleeping bag, all wet, coughing, generally fucked up,” he said. “We were all allowed to be slaughtered.” The soldier’s wife declined to comment when approached by this newspaper.
They are just three of thousands of calls between soldiers in the trenches or advanced positions that Ukrainian experts have eavesdropped, pored over for snippets of intelligence and then, where there is propaganda value, made public.
“There is simply no discipline and it will only get worse now that they have mobilised 300,000 people who will be barely trained. Mobilised soldiers will be terrified of being in a war zone, and naturally, they will try to call home.”
The former Kremlin official said Putin was learning the hard way that his army was in dire need of modernisation and that the top-down Soviet style model was not fit for purpose.
“The army doctrine is based on punishment, so soldiers get penalised if they mess up, but no one is trying to prevent them from giving away information in the first place,” the source said. “Screw-ups will happen until they change the whole philosophy.”
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