The Russians are on the warpath – and Europe is Vladimir Putin’s next target. That was Sir Keir Starmer’s alarming claim at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. Britons ‘must be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to protect our people, our values, and our way of life’, Starmer warned. Britain and Germany’s top military commanders delivered the same message in a recent article. Russia’s military posture ‘has shifted decisively westward’, wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton and General Carsten Breuer. Soon the Kremlin ‘may be emboldened to extend its aggression beyond Ukraine’.
Really? According to much western coverage in mainstream and social media, the Russian army is crumbling, corrupt and inept. The same Kremlin which is allegedly setting its sights on re-conquering the Baltics is also reportedly facing imminent insolvency, an inflation crisis and economic collapse. In some quarters Nato membership for Ukraine is heralded as the ultimate security guarantee against Russian aggression – yet it is also Nato which is, in the Starmer-Knighton narrative, the target of Putin’s next attack.
Are Russia and its army on the verge of collapse, or preparing for a Stalin-style assault on Nato? Both narratives cannot simultaneously be true. And as far as Putin’s army is concerned, overwhelming evidence suggests that it is rotten to the core.
An acquaintance of mine was recently killed fighting for the Russian army in Kharkiv province. I will call him Ivan. His pathetic story is a good place from which to explore the profound dysfunction of today’s Russian army. Trained as a lawyer, he suffered mental health problems, became very religious – but he also occasionally beat his wife, a journalist and close friend of mine. Ivan suffered a breakdown, impulsively kidnapped his small children and fled with them to the Russian provinces. His wife tracked them down, and he was arrested. The cops gave him a choice: join the army or face assault charges. Like other desperate men who make up the Russian army’s estimated 30,000 monthly recruits, he took the signing bonus – worth more than a year’s average wages – and duly enlisted.
Unsurprisingly, he hated it. After a year of service Ivan tried to get out and collected medical unfitness certificates from psychiatrists. But a group of comrades from his unit were offered a bounty to get him back. They travelled to Moscow, lured him out of his flat with an invitation to a drink, then kidnapped him. The Russian army, in other words, had offered a cash reward to serving soldiers to abduct a mentally ill comrade and forcibly return him to active service. Ivan had always managed to avoid frontline service. But his luck ran out late last month, when he was killed on his first assault south of Kharkiv. His now ex-wife is not too sad, for she gets his flat and a £100,000 death payout.
For a more complete depiction of the reality of the war in Ukraine from the Russian side, take a look at the feature-length documentary Russians at War, available on YouTube. This extraordinary film was made by the Canadian-Russian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova, who got herself unofficially embedded with a frontline infantry company fighting in Donbas after a chance encounter on a train with a solider. The picture that emerges as Trofimova follows the unit from the spring to autumn of 2023 is of a rag-tag force of undisciplined, reluctant civilians who have mostly signed up only for the money. All are, notionally, volunteers desperate enough to risk their lives for a signing bounty. But many speak of their desperation, their revulsion at the war, and of the corruption and ineptitude of their commanders.
‘We are people with broken fates,’ complains one private who has just returned from the front lines. ‘We were dumped, then got surrounded. Out of our battalion of 900 just 300 made it.’ Among the survivors is a soldier with severe tics and evident mental retardation. Another is almost paralysed in his left arm and leg – not from a wound but a pre-existing neurological condition. ‘Don’t believe what you see on TV, it’s all lies,’ says another soldier. At a drunken party in a half-ruined village house in the rear, the soldiers – dressed in motley bits of uniform, Adidas tops and flip-flops – debate why they are fighting. ‘Let’s admit it, everyone here has the same motive – money,’ says one. Another counters: ‘You have nobody to feed at home. I have 16-year-old and 18-year-old sons. I am fighting so they don’t have to.’ Another admits to being a drug addict who ‘would have gone back to drugs if I hadn’t come here’. Vitaly, 37, a cook, says he signed up ‘for patriotism – but I don’t see it any more. TV is a dangerous thing. I watched it and signed up for six months. Now they tell me the only way I will leave is in a body bag. We don’t want to fight but nobody has a choice – not us, not the Ukrainians.’
‘They tell me the only way I will leave is in a body bag. We don’t want to fight but nobody has a choice’
In a bitter irony, two of the main protagonists of the documentary are from Ukraine. Ilya, 49, the driver who first invited Trofimova to the unit, is from Donetsk, but lost his home and business to Ukrainian shelling in 2014. ‘Everything that united Russia and Ukraine was destroyed by western [Ukrainian] nationalists,’ says Ilya. ‘They say that we [Russian-speaking] Ukrainians are second-class citizens. But we had so much that we had in common. I miss that brotherly union.’ ‘Kedr’, 35, a rifleman, says his ‘family roots are in Ukraine. I believe that Ukrainians and us are brotherly people. Let everyone let themselves get home alive.’
The battalion take delivery of brand-new BTR armoured personnel carriers – and laugh when the driver discovers that many parts are stamped ‘Made in the USSR’. The unit is deployed to the front lines at Bakhmut, but most of the soldiers don’t want to advance. ‘We’re not refusing to go,’ one soldier says to an NCO who is attempting to cajole infantrymen forward to frontline trenches, ‘but we’re all against it.’ Even ‘Saturn’, a lieutenant, admits to Trofimova that ‘people are dying in droves, but nobody cares’. Eventually the guys advance, only to suffer heavy losses from Ukrainian drones.
When the film came out it was lambasted(absurdly) by pro-Ukrainians as Russian propaganda, and dropped from several film festivals despite its radically anti–Kremlin message. Some critics were sceptical that a reporter could have snuck into a frontline unit without accreditation or official approval from senior command. But in my experience this is totally believable, because I did exactly the same thing, twice, with the Russian army in Chechnya in 1999 and 2000.
Travelling incognito, in defiance of a Kremlin ban on foreign journalists in the battle zone, I went with a Russian photographer who had made friends with members of some frontline units. After a drunken lunch with the officers of an Interior Ministry unit stationed on the Chechnya-Dagestan border, we sat on a makeshift bench while the commanding officer ordered a tank crew to do some target practice on the Chechen village across the valley. As the heavy-calibre shells from the vintage T-55’s main armament blew up sheds, barns and houses, the officers placed bets on the gunners’ marksmanship. Near the village of Shatoy, I watched as soldiers roughed up bound suspected rebels with kicks to the head. The officers got wildly drunk every night, and the foul-mouthed senior warrant officers regularly smacked and kicked young soldiers. Standing on a nine-storey building on the edge of Grozny in February 2000, I watched the terrible spectacle of the artillery of five full Russian divisions pouring indiscriminate fire – at a rate of at least 50 rounds a minute, without exaggeration – into the ruined and surrounded city.
My experiences were a generation ago. Trofimova’s film was shot in 2023. But by all accounts the situation in the Russian army in Ukraine has deteriorated dramatically since then. Storm V, a Telegram blog that reports from the Storm ‘penal/volunteer’ battalion fighting near Pokrovsk, reported in a 14 February post that the unit – made up mostly of released prisoners – lacked ‘even the simplest armour, helmets, masks, generators, magazines for machine-guns’. The unit was regularly chosen for frontline duty because ‘they are told, “You know both cold and hunger, so go ahead, you are more prepared for a life of survival.”’ Commanders, according to the anonymous (and unverified) author of the blog, openly talk of ‘meat assaults’ – the practice of throwing infantry forward into the drone-saturated ‘death zone’ between the two armies. ‘On all fronts [Storm V] are at the forefront of the attack,’ says the blogger. ‘They are not given medals, those are received by those who follow.’
Commanders talk of ‘meat assaults’ – the practice of throwing infantry into the drone-saturated ‘death zone’
Footage of Russian soldiers being punished for drunkenness and desertion by being taped naked to trees in the freezing cold, then being whipped or punched by officers, appear regularly on Russian social media. This month Denis Kolesnikov, a junior sergeant in the 1435th Regiment, posted a video blog where he explained that he deserted his unit because commanders were demanding bribes not to send men to the front lines. ‘Over half of our squad, about 50 people, were executed by commanders,’ claimed Kolesnikov, blogging from Russia, not from Ukrainian captivity. ‘Everyone must pay money to commanders. When we line up, everyone is told how much they owe. Each person was told to pay from one to three million rubles [£10,000 to £30,000]… not to go to the contact line. As soon as money runs out, they get sent there or killed.’
There are dozens of reports, too, of seriously unfit men being pressed into service. Footage of a black African volunteer with an anti-tank grenade strapped to his chest was recently published on a Telegram channel with the jokey caption that the man’s role was as a ‘bottle opener’ to blast a way for his fellows. And a huge cache of messages lifted recently from the phone of the Russian major general Roman Demurchiev by Ukrainian hackers reveals a force riven by feuds between generals, plagued by corruption, and full of contempt for superiors and peers. ‘[New] people come, we bring them in at night, and they’re ready for battle in the morning,’ complains Demurchiev to a fellow officer. ‘They’re zero-level trained.’ He describes his own command as ‘idiots, sycophants and cowardly traitors’ – and jokes with his wife about sending her the severed ears of dead Ukrainian soldiers.
In Iraq and Afghanistan I did 13 official journalistic ‘embeds’ with various frontline US and British units between 2001 and 2005 – including the US Third Marine Corps during heavy fighting in Fallujah. The extreme professionalism and discipline of the British and American armies, even under fire, was hugely impressive. The contrast with the chaotic, corrupt, amateurish and utterly unwilling Russian army that is fighting in Ukraine could not be starker. Putin’s forces may command deadly missiles, long-range drones and a modern air-force. And on the ground massed artillery and successive meat-waves of men recruited as cannon fodder may grind slowly and bloodily forward. But a threat to Nato? Not in a million years.
Comments