Aug 26, 2024
- Videos appear to show Russian soldiers surrendering to Ukrainian troops taking Russian territory.
- An expert said the footage suggests the soldiers do not have combat experience.
- Ukraine is advancing in Russia’s Kursk region.
Videos that appear to show Russian forces surrendering to Ukrainian troops on Russian soil suggest that those soldiers are desperate and inexperienced, warfare experts said.
The Washington Post reviewed more than 130 photos and videos taken since Ukraine’s surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk region began on August 6.
Russia was slow to react to the Ukraine invasion, allowing several days to pass before it diverted enough troops to slow the incursion. Its leaders were said to have ignored intelligence about a Ukrainian military buildup on the border.
Dara Massicot, a Russian military expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the publication: “My instinct upon seeing those videos was that those soldiers were not combat-experienced troops who have been fighting inside Ukraine.”
Most of the videos seen by the Post appeared to have been filmed by Ukrainian soldiers and shared on social media, the outlet said. Business Insider could not independently verify the footage.
Massicot told the Post: “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a video of Russian soldiers surrendering en masse like that.”
The Post said that the visuals it verified showed that Ukraine had captured at least 247 Russian soldiers in the region. Before the Kursk invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Ukraine was holding 1,348 Russian soldiers.
Mathieu Boulègue, another Russian military expert, told the Post that the reported number of Russian troops who had surrendered was surprisingly high. “I was not expecting so many easy surrenders,” he said.
“But it also shows how fragile the war narrative is in Russia, and it also shows how desperate probably these soldiers are who would much rather be with Ukraine in Ukrainian prisons or cells than fighting for Russia,” Boulègue, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said.
Ukraine said it captured 102 soldiers in one day, in what would be the largest single group it had captured since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Officials also told the Financial Times that the total number of captured Russian soldiers was in the “hundreds.”
A Ukrainian deputy commander who was involved in the incursion previously told the BBC that the soldiers guarding Russia’s borders “were mainly kids doing their mandatory service.”
Western intelligence, defense analysts, Ukrainian soldiers, and captured Russian troops have said that many Russian soldiers are poorly trained.
Rainer Saks, an Estonian security expert, told ERR that the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk had been successful “mainly due to the fact that the Russian military command and political leadership were completely unprepared for this kind of event.”
Some of the troops in the videos analyzed by the Post said they were conscripts. Putin had promised that these soldiers would not be involved in combat.
Ukraine said it has taken more than 483 square miles of Russian territory — more territory than Russia has captured in Ukraine since the start of the year.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s aim with the incursion is to create a “buffer zone” that can minimize Russia’s ability to attack Ukraine.
Warfare analysts also told BI that Ukraine likely wanted to stretch Russia’s forces and give fresh motivation to its troops and allies.
In some videos, we see how the average roach thinks, how he would volunteer to don a uniform and “defend” the country. It’s always easy to have a big mouth as a civilian in a city far away from the shooting.
Once the ruskie meat puppet is in uniform, facing the enemy, he’s in a harsh reality. He sees that he has shitty training, shitty gear, led by red-eyed ghoulish officers, who are only good at driving him and his meat puppet comrades to attack, are treated like the dirt they are, and suffer hunger, hardships, thirst, and fear.
For what? For a criminal, bloodthirsty fascist.
On Aug 12, RFE/RL reported:
“Ukrainian soldiers say they found bodies on the battlefield with uniforms bearing Grim Reaper patches near Bakhmut in the Donetsk region. The patches also bore the slogans, “Death is our business — and business is good,” and, “I don’t believe in anything. I’m here for violence” — calling cards for the Vagner Group, a mercenary paramilitary organization. There have been widespread reports of Vagner forces fighting in Ukraine.”
Those calling cards are symbolic of the entire putler war machine. That’s why it has to be dismantled and destroyed. In a recent article; I forget which, the author said (to paraphrase) : “the russian method of victory is based on Zhukov, who won by littering the battlefield with the corpses of his own men.”
Zhukov particularly liked to use Ukrainians as cannon fodder because “they will only rise up against us anyway.” Now putler is using ethnic minorities in the same way, as well as psychopathic murderers and assorted other vermin. In this way, russia is being socially engineered to increase the ethnic russian majority. It was previously claimed wrongly to be 80%; even the CIA and Wiki went along with this. The putler war is another way of securing these internal objectives.
Looking closely at mafia land’s regime, it’s more than clear that it got its inspiration from both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, two of the world’s worst mass murderers.