Perhaps the most striking contradiction to the Russian president’s boastful claims came in Kazan, where dozens of conscripts were captured on video late Friday criticizing the military leadership outside a gathering point for recruits. The angry crowd complained of a lack of water, food and “rusty” rifles from the 1970s that one soldier said were too “dangerous” to even use, according to local outlets. It is impressive that the troops were not swayed by a military man who threatened to call the police. “What kind of MAT are you trying to scare us with? We’re going to call everyone we know right now, and they’re going to come and beat all of you and the riot police,” shouted a protesting soldier. The officer was forced to retreat as the rioting crowd chanted “cock,” the video shows. By Saturday, local authorities said the issues reported by the troops had been “resolved,” according to Tatar-Inform. But anger continued to simmer elsewhere, including in Voronezh, where relatives of troops gathered outside the local prosecutor’s office to record a video appeal to the governor begging him to spare new troops from their own command. “On the very first day they put [the draftees] in the first line [in Luhansk]. The command left the battlefield and fled, saying they would soon return and bring the troops their belongings,” a family member said in the video shared by the independent Verstka agency. Within 40 minutes of being dropped onto the battlefield, he said, the leadership had not returned, the shelling began and “the fighting went on for three days.” “They did not sleep, they did not eat and for three days they held the line and did not leave contrary to the order,” he said. “They tell us over the phone that our sons are alive and well and even fulfilling their military duty. How the hell are they alive and well when they were all killed there?’ another soldier’s mother told Verstka. More than 500 soldiers in that battalion were subsequently killed after being abandoned by command, according to one of the surviving soldiers who spoke to the outlet. Aleksei Agafonov told Verstka that his battalion originally consisted of 570 men – but only 29 made it and another 12 were wounded after fierce fighting outside Russian-held Makeyevka. The massive losses were confirmed by another surviving soldier, who was identified as Nikolai Voronin. “There were a lot of dead people, they were lying everywhere… Their hands and feet were cut off,” Voronin said, adding that troops had been ordered to dig trenches before all hell broke loose and many of them were wounded “almost digging their own graves.” . “When it all started, the officers ran away immediately,” Agafonov said. “On TV they show that everything is beautiful, but in reality, here in the Luhansk region, they throw certain mobilized troops on the front line, and when we left there, without seeing any officers, we came back and saw that on the third line it is only contractors and volunteers and the draftees are at the front,” he said Putin, at a ceremony in Red Square on Friday, tried to paint a very different portrait of his mobilization effort, boasting that thousands of men had chosen to join as volunteers, resulting in a total of 318,000 new soldiers, 49,000 of whom he said. they were already “doing their duty” in military ranks. “The number of volunteers is not decreasing,” he said in comments reported by RIA Novosti. “It’s a very large number of people [mobilized]. Families, mothers, fathers, children, spouses are left behind… Of course the state is doing everything to support them,” he said. He went on to invoke the popular Russian slogan “we do not leave our own behind”, arguing that the phrase is not “empty words” but is “how everything actually happens”. The most damning rebuke to that claim came just hours later from a Ukrainian intelligence man identified as a soldier from Russia’s 752nd Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment based in occupied Donetsk – who said troops there were literally being ordered to leave theirs back, so the government can avoid paying their families the promised payments. The admission was made in what Ukrainian authorities described as a wiretapping of a phone conversation between the Russian soldier and someone back home. “They will not allow the 200s to be collected,” the alleged soldier said, using Russian military jargon for those killed in action. “No body, no case. It can [they will think the person killed] he has been arrested and they can hold back money from the relatives and no fucking payment. Do you get the idea?” Asked if he had personally seen the abandoned bodies, he said: “Of course.” “They’re fucking lying all over the place and we can’t pick them up,” he said to his mute interlocutor, who asked incredulously if the military command treated only conscripts this way. “That’s how it is with everybody across the board,” he said.
