No longer a “schmon”: a Ukrainian Armed Forces fighter told how a Russian soldier has changed during two years of war

In terms of technical support, the Russian infantry is in many ways ahead of the Ukrainian infantry, the defender says.

The level of support and training for Russian soldiers has improved significantly compared to the first months of a full-scale war. Ukrainian Armed Forces fighter Yegor Oleinik spoke about this in an interview with Telegraph .

“At the beginning of the war there were really some fools. But now there are trained military men there. We storm their positions and if we have ordinary AK-47s, then they already have modernized AK-12s. Everyone has sights, thermal imagers, assault backpacks, modernized helmets , 20-30 magazines, even a thermal imager on each machine gun. We don’t have a thermal imager on the machine guns and sights on each machine gun, but they have all this,” says the defender.

Yegor also recalls his experience of communicating with captured occupiers.

“One was 19 years old, a driver mechanic from Buryatia, and the second was a 26-year-old BMP-3 gunner from Moscow itself. When we asked them why they went to fight, they mostly kept silent, but it was like, “Well, we for Russia…” We answered: you are on the territory of Ukraine, what does “we are for Russia” have to do with it – “Yes, I have a commander, I have a family.” Despite the fact that they were not mobilized, but went on their own.” , – says the defender.

Providing for the Russian army

As UNIAN wrote, at the very beginning of a full-scale war, a soldier of the occupation army, a native of occupied Gorlovka, Andrei Ryazantsev, was captured by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Due to his small stature and ridiculous appearance in military uniform, he became an Internet meme known as “Chmonya” . During interrogation, he said that the occupiers were thrown into the war “naked and barefoot.”

Despite some progress, problems with providing the occupying army with everything necessary remain, and in some areas they are only getting worse. We recently reported that the occupiers are increasingly relying on 70-year-old tanks made during the times of Stalin and Khrushchev.

(C)UNIAN 2024