Ukraine War
Ukraine Military Motivation 101: You Are Meat
That’s certainly one way to keep you troops committed and in line …
Yes, ‘You are meat’.
Here is the content of a phone conversation between a Russian conscript in Ukraine and his sister, as reported in the South China Morning Post.
TV Rain, a Russian-language independent television channel that relocated to Latvia earlier this year spoke to relatives of two of the troops.
The sister of a soldier called Alexander, who was drafted on October 16, said that they were brought to the Luhansk region on November 1 and immediately sent to the front.
“The commanders said that you are meat, they brought you here for this, they will kill you all anyway. They gave them one sapper shovel for 30 people and told them to dig trenches for themselves,” she said he told her.
Coffee or Die magazine reported that on Sept. 19 and Friday, Sept. 23, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency reported that Russian commanders near the front-line town of Bakhmut had enacted “order No 222” which authorizes ‘blocking units’.
It’s an old Russian tactic.
Order 222 is similar to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s WWII order 227 which contained the phrase, “Not a step back”. It ordered “blocking detachments” (zagraditelnyi otriad) to shoot “panic-mongers and cowards” behind the Soviet lines.
The blocking units were assembled from Beria’s NKVD troops (forerunner of the KGB).
Here is the Telegram post from TVRain which reports the conversations:
In the post, Alexander told his sister that after the shelling which lasted for 3 days they could only account for 31 of the 560 in his detachment. They do not know exactly what happened to the rest.
“They had no weapons, nothing. They were given four grenades, they dug the ground with their hands,” Ekaterina Brazhnikova, the sister of a different mobilised soldier, told TVRain.
Of course there is exaggeration, propaganda and fake news aplenty in this war. But there is a solid foundation of intel to support the story.
On 4 November 2022 the UK Defence Ministry update mentioned that ‘blocking units’ are being deployed to shoot retreating Russian soldiers.
There seems to be little doubt that Russia’s mobilisation of 300,000 men has been a fiasco, and that Russia does not have the weapons to arm them or the required training capability.
Whilst I feel sorry for the poor buggers that Putin has enslaved, it can only be a good thing in the long run as it will create great disaffection in Russia.
Whereas on the other hand…
Russia is digging in for a long winter in Ukraine, with disaffected armed forces, no air superiority, a frightened Black Sea Fleet and a military command structure in turmoil as the Russian Defence Ministry seeks to pin the blame on its senior command (anyone but Putin).
It’s clear that no one wants to be the meat in the sandwich, but poor Ivan on the frontline has no choice.
Fight or be shot.
Minced.
Meat, which ever way you look at it.
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…meat grinders
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