Meduza asked Russians who have already taken part in the country’s war against Ukraine — as contract soldiers and mercenaries — to tell us what they think of the mobilization effort.
If I’m being honest, they’re all going to die there. They’ll be mutilated and killed. This isn’t a trained army! I, for example, served [as a contract soldier] for a long time, then chose to go [to the front in Ukraine] myself — and I still found myself unprepared. The very first day, I realized I had made the biggest mistake of my life.
I’ve served more than a few times, and I can tell when I’m being sent into battle. And I immediately told this guy with big epaulets to fuck off: “I’m not just a bargaining chip! I’m a soldier for the Russian army! You can’t just throw me under the bus like this!” To which he answered, “You’re all just cannon fodder. You’re the third group of people to form this battalion. Do you know where the first two groups died? And you’ll die here.” Then he told my commander, “Send in the meat." [Us.]
They were trying to advance, and they threw us at a Ukrainian stronghold, where tanks, artillery, and machine guns were all operating. And the Ukrainians had hundreds of troops, while we only had 40.
You wake up as one person, and by the evening, you’ve become someone else. You go through such intense metamorphoses that it scares you. It scares you how blind you were below. And deaf.
If history is any guide, Russia will again be fighting both their Ukrainian foes and the vodka bottle. The problem of drunkenness has already become so acute that regional authorities across Russia’s Far East have banned the sale of alcohol near call-up points. Meanwhile, rumors are circulating of a nationwide Prohibition on vodka to ease mobilization.
Not that this is news to anyone here (well almost anyone), but Putin’s war does not seem to be going well in the opinion of the soldiers fighting for him:
It will take him a while to come to terms with reality. He’s unlikely to actually nuke anything. He can always just hunker down and try to outlast the rest of the world because he thinks Russians can tolerate a lot more suffering than we can.
I gotta say I find this kind of thing tiresome. Can either of you look me in the eye and say that you think Mearsheimer’s contention was that Russia were afraid of a direct ground invasion by NATO troops? Like I assume you get that this is not the case and that that’s what nukes are for. So why pretend? It’s hard enough to understand wtf is going on and what people think without playing dumb half the time.
If the contention was that he didn’t care about a ground invasion then why did he care about Nato expansion to a shared border? Last I checked, he has ICBM’s. The whole thing was an exercise in dishonesty from the first instance, you’re right about that, but the dishonesty was from Mershemier and the other useful idiots parroting Putin’s propaganda. Chief amongst them, Trump of course.
We have a containment thread for this. Plus it’s clear you’re trolling Keeed and hoping to start a fight. The CN stuff at least has content but you are just doing no content jabs.
Either post those in the Ukraine LC thread or I’m going to start deleting and moderating accordingly.
We can see the impact of NATO expansion in this war. NATO are able to supply arms to Ukraine via Poland, a NATO country since 1999. This is making it harder for Russia to project power into its neighbour Ukraine.
You’re going to be like “Well that’s GOOD! I don’t WANT them to do that!”. Right, but that’s not relevant. As I’ve posted before, after the US tried to invade Cuba and kill its leader and Cuba turned to the USSR for help, by all rights the US should have eaten shit about having missiles stationed along its border. Instead the world was taken to the brink of nuclear war. If you’re concerned about such things as “not having nuclear war”, you have to deal with world powers as they will actually behave, not as you think they should.
Mearsheimer was wrong, but he was wrong because Russia isn’t actually a great power anymore. It’s more like a larger North Korea, which can’t be challenged directly because it has the power of wreaking destruction, but now has to accept that as it has no power beyond that, it has little control over regional affairs. If Russia had easily crushed Ukraine and right now had a successful puppet regime installed in the country, it wouldn’t mean that he was right necessarily, but it would be a lot clearer that “omg look though they left their border with the Baltics undefended” is a retarded argument that he was wrong.
