BY ISABEL VAN BRUGEN NEWSWEEK WORLD
Three Russian soldiers blew themselves up in a grenade explosion after getting drunk during a resupply run in Russia’s southwestern Voronezh region, according to local media reports.
The three servicemen died in a house in the city of Rossosh, and a further two were injured, according to the Telegram channel of independent Russian-language news outlet Astra, and the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel, which has close ties to Russian security forces.
The news comes nearly 19 months into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Publicly available data released by Kyiv’s military indicates that more than 270,000 Russian troops have been “liquidated” so far in the conflict.
Russian state-run news agency Tass reported on September 16 that three people had died in Rossosh as a result of a grenade explosion, but it didn’t specify whether they were military personnel.
Regional authorities haven’t commented on the incident. Newsweek has contacted Russia’s foreign ministry via email for comment.
Local news outlet Bloknot reported that the grenade exploded in a private house that was rented by five men.
Eyewitnesses told the publication that the men were relaxing and having a barbecue on the evening of September 15, and a conflict broke out later that night. “There was a drunken conversation between the men,” local residents said.
The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel reported that the three servicemen were in Rossosh, tasked to buy military equipment, and were drinking at the time of the explosion. The men “belonged to the Central Military District and were in service,” the channel said.
“In total, they were given three days for delivery,” the channel reported, citing an unnamed source.
“At some point, three troops came out of the house (two remained inside and were not injured) and an explosion occurred in the yard. It was established that an F-1 grenade exploded,” VChK-OGPU reported.
Astra reported that the three men who were killed in the grenade explosion were “professional sappers.”
According to the U.S. Army, a sapper-also known as an elite combat engineer-carries out military engineering duties such as minefield placement or clearing, bridge-building, demolitions, field defenses, and road and airfield construction. Sappers are responsible for tasks facilitating the movement of forces and impeding those of their enemies. The two other wounded soldiers were reported to be seriously injured.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/nation-world/world/article279465019.html
Astra reported that the three men who were killed in the grenade explosion were “professional sappers.”
I would hardly call monkeys with grenades, professional at anything, except drinking vodka, maybe.
Nice! I’ve always been a big advocate for the mafia army to commit self-immolation.
In the US Army, they’re simply called combat engineers, without the “elite” in the name.
Every russian soldier should be issued with a weeks supply of vodka and a dozen hand grenades. 😂
Good idea. Speaking of which, I remember us discussing early in the war about the idea of Ukraine planting masses of bottles of vodka, where the orcs can find them to defeat them easier. Might’ve been a viable plan. 😁
I remember an FSB agent (or KGB it was under Gorbachev) who said in a report that Gorbachev had launched a health policy against alcoholism, because it was already a huge problem – and the guy said that ‘one weekend he was at a wedding and there was no alcohol… and that day he and his fellow alcoholics in withdrawal said to themselves that they would stop obeying Gorbachev.. .
Putin has relaunched the vodka trade but the autocrats have strategies doomed to failure in the more or less long term: whether it is surrounding themselves with loyal morons rather than competent and stimulating people, whether it is propaganda which poisons everyone world without taking into account that lying is an elastic band on which one pulls and whose end is predictable…
There are social and behavioral strategies that are more effective than others, and if you ruin everything you touch, you can’t win. Putin who spat on Gorbachev will nevertheless himself be the gravedigger of the “Russian world” because no one wants to belong to a group of assholes. people want to be proud. this is the basic mechanics, besides the desire of Ukrainians to be independent would probably not have been so pronounced if they could have belonged to a larger group of which they could be proud and satisfied.
Putin is the gravedigger of the Russian world, he must confine the fire to his world and stop the rot in his family. It’s not about this narcissistic asshole becoming the gravedigger of us all. that means you have to play it smart. personally I have as much confidence in the Ukrainians as in the Westerners (even if Putin plays the rot of our societies by relying on European far-right movements to collapse Europe from within and by relying on all the useful idiots who make people confused and indecisive.)
for the U.S.A. and their freedom of expression, I hope they understand that if they give the same value, the same diffusion, to conspiratorial information or to information like “the earth is flat” (which just requires a moron knowing how to click the mouse, zero cost) – than the information that we live in a multiverse (which requires scientists, years of training, years of research, information which has a very high cost) then l As human beings naturally tend towards ease and magical thinking, they will soon be overwhelmed and dragged to the bottom of the hole by an army of blind idiots. I don’t wish them.
Otherwise I wondered how the imprisonment of Russians was managed, was there work to detoxify prisoners (work towards lucidity, accountability, deradicalization, empathy) but I never nothing seen there. I hope it exists, it seems important to me.