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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCaptured Russian soldiers: We will be 'dead' if we are sent back home
Russian soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces have said they will be dead if they return home, where they will be regarded as failures and killed.
Captured troops - who have been filmed in breach of the Geneva Convention - have begged not to be sent back to Russia, fearing they will be shot by their own people.
One soldier, speaking at a press conference in Kyiv, said that he had been told by his parents that a funeral had already been prepared for him.
The soldier, deployed with Russia's 2nd Motor Rifle Division, said: "In Russia, we are already considered dead. I was given the opportunity to call my parents and they told me that a funeral for me had already been arranged.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/captured-russian-soldiers-dead-sent-144033819.html
Lovie777
(11,986 posts)Quakerfriend
(5,417 posts)destroying the country.
SheltieLover
(57,073 posts)paleotn
(17,778 posts)Particularly those you've sent off to risk their lives doing a terrible job. As ham handed and stupid as their invasion plan.
SheltieLover
(57,073 posts)dchill
(38,320 posts)roamer65
(36,739 posts)If Russia can offer Syrians bonuses to fight for them, so can Ukraine. Just don't let them operate the anti missile equipment.
Putin would wonder where his army went...
Raven123
(4,714 posts)róisín_dubh
(11,784 posts)These are violations of international humanitarian law.
sarge43
(28,939 posts)Time to reevaluate your career goals, comrades.
mysteryowl
(7,323 posts)BlueIdaho
(13,582 posts)Send them home in body bags. I have zero sympathy for any Russian, especially one in uniform.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)and even less choice in being sent to Ukraine.
Keep in mind all of our soldiers are volunteers. We last drafted in 1973, and the very last draftee left in 2011. So I'm sure you're okay with U.S. soldiers being sent home from Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else, in body bags.
BlueIdaho
(13,582 posts)But I am ok with every Russian soldier in Ukraine killing women and children (and thats all of them) being sent home in a body bag. I stand by what I said.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)Really?
What part of conscripts being the same as involuntary are you not getting?
I sincerely hope you are as condemning of American soldiers, all of whom are voluntary and have been for decades.
Dopers_Greed
(2,640 posts)BlueIdaho
(13,582 posts)You dont have to like it or me.
Dopers_Greed
(2,640 posts)Last edited Fri Mar 11, 2022, 12:41 PM - Edit history (2)
I want Russia to be defeated by Ukraine too.
But sending captured soldiers home "in body bags" would be a war crime, and would make Ukrainians no better than Putin's thugs.
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)There seems to be a pretty bad typo.
Crunchy Frog
(26,548 posts)I have as much sympathy for them as I have for Americans who fought in Iraq or Vietnam. They had far less information and far fewer choices than our soldiers ever had.
BlueIdaho
(13,582 posts)I stand by what I said.
Crunchy Frog
(26,548 posts)Those are aerial bombardments, and long distance missile attacks.
The ones doing the bombing are rarely in a position to be captured.
I stand by my position that most effective approach is to incentivize soldiers to surrender or to desert.
paleotn
(17,778 posts)we have to remember, most of these guys don't want to be there anymore than the Ukrainians want them there. As an old cold warrior, it's easy for me to dust off the old war face and hate everything remotely Russian. I've done that more than a few times recently. Old habits die hard. I have to step back and remember that these poor dumb bastards are as worthy of my pity as the poor dumb bastards in their crappy Soviet submarines I was trained to fight. It's tough, but it's the right thing to do. Hate their leadership. Don't hate the poor dumb bastards who didn't have much of a choice in the matter.
BlueIdaho
(13,582 posts)I stand by what I said.
paleotn
(17,778 posts)It would make it a hell of a lot easier if it were.
BlueIdaho
(13,582 posts)If you intentionally kill civilian non-combatants - babies, children, pregnant women, old people - people you have promised safe passage - you are a war criminal and you deserve to be sent home in a body bag. Every last one of you. I stand by what I said.
WhiteTara
(29,676 posts)around and shooting at their fellow countrymen? Put them in their own brigade with an armed drone watching above for treachery.
YoshidaYui
(41,759 posts)what an asshole.
Mr.Bill
(24,103 posts)just called them suckers and losers.
YoshidaYui
(41,759 posts)iemanja
(53,001 posts)Lord. No wonder Putin's army sucks.
PatrickforB
(14,515 posts)Any soldiers who were captured by the Germans, even for just a few minutes, spent years in the Gulags after the war.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)how Russian soldiers who had the misfortune to be captured by Germans in WWII did not fare well when they went home. I'm under the impression that many were repatriated, despite pleading for that not to happen, because they knew what Stalin would do.
PatrickforB
(14,515 posts)biography, titled 'Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy'. It takes Stalin from his boyhood through his death in 1953. Well worth reading, though there are newer biographies now. I'm a big believer in learning from history. Stalin believed he could win a nuclear exchange with the West in 1953, so his plan, said Volkogonov, as I remember, was to start a wave of terror by beginning to round up and kill Jews in the USSR. He knew that, after the Holocaust, the West would not ignore that. There would, therefore, be a war, which he felt the USSR would win.
Fortunately, he had a stroke, and I have since read other biographies that have spoken of the night in 1953 that he died of the stroke. Some believe that Lavrenti Beria, Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev may have poisoned him, or at the least allowed him to die of that stroke.
And then, of course, a friend turned me on to Al Stewart's great ballad, the Roads to Moscow. If you haven't ever heard that, it is about the experience of a Russian soldier who served in the Red Army during WWII. Definitely worth a listen.
So, Putin was born six months before Joseph Stalin died, served in the KGB for fifteen years, and then later made the head of the FSB, the Russian secret police. He's made from the same cloth as Stalin - a very dangerous man. And like Stalin, very paranoid against the West. He's been listening to that Alexandr Dugin, who wrote his Foundations of Geopolitics, which is his blueprint for undermining Western democracies...
But you knew all this...that Al Stewart song is good if you haven't ever heard it.
ProfessorGAC
(64,413 posts)Seems to be a custom for them.
The Bolsheviks had secret police machine gunners set up to shoot anybody who turned around to retreat.
1918, 1943, & now.
Their autocrats must just consider such "motivation" completely acceptable.
Marcuse
(7,392 posts)dalton99a
(81,065 posts)Samrob
(4,298 posts)SunSeeker
(51,367 posts)Cha
(295,899 posts)Invader Vlad's War.
💙💛
Wingus Dingus
(8,049 posts)in a work program or something after the war, rebuilding Ukraine--but not all of them will be good security risks--they would have to vet them carefully, and send back to Russia any poor risks. Give Russian soldiers an incentive to desert, rather than fight to the death.
Flaleftist
(3,473 posts)If they know they will die if they are captured, that would make it more likely they would fight to the death. If they know they have a chance at a life somewhere else, many might surrender. A cash payment along with asylum might help. Offer them citizenship somewhere else and $100K. That's 10 billion for 100,000, which I recall is about the current Russian force deployed there.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)Kind of remind's me of the scene in Woody Allen's Love and Death, where he is reluctant to go fight in the war against Napolean:
Russian Mother : He'll go and he'll fight, and I hope they will put him in the front lines.
Boris (Woody) : Thanks a lot, Mom. My mother, folks.
Brutal people!
Hav
(5,969 posts)I could believe that a funeral was planned because they were MIA or they thought they died. Hard to believe returning POWs will just get executed.
But then again, I'm lucky to not live under a dictator.
whistler162
(11,155 posts)be okay for Putin!