Russia Sends Ill-Trained Draftees Into Combat Amid Losses, Analysts Say

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia is funneling newly drafted conscripts with little training to the front line in Ukraine’s east while mounting intensified but ineffective attacks and suffering heavy casualties, according to the Ukrainian military and Western analysts.

Grisly videos of Russian infantry in poorly prepared positions being struck by artillery have partly supported those assertions, as has reporting in Russian news media of mobilized soldiers telling relatives about high casualty rates. The videos, filmed by Ukrainian drones, have not been independently verified, and their exact locations could not be determined.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced Friday that the draft he ordered Sept. 21, a chaotic effort that swept up some men who should have been exempt, had added 318,000 troops to Russia’s military, with 49,000 of them already in combat. But he did not acknowledge the widespread complaints of inadequate training and equipment, with some soldiers being killed within days of deployment.

Attention has shifted recently to the southern front, where Ukrainian forces are slowly closing in on the Russian-held city of Kherson, but the Kremlin is also pouring more troops into the eastern Donbas region, trying to halt recent Ukrainian advances while rebuilding ground forces that have been decimated by more than eight months of war.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-sends-ill-trained-draftees-141256093.html

Pooty Poot demands a human sacrifice.

[keithbvadu2]

1. Little training, weapons, ammo, food, supplies, uniforms... The only thing Putin supplies in abundan

Little training, weapons, ammo, food, supplies, uniforms... The only thing Putin supplies in abundance is transportation to the front.

[Tetrachloride]

2. I saw a live Russian newscast today.

the news video of Russian artillery is very isolated, in quite nice looking fields, not a single building in sight.

2 interviews with Russian soldiers, one masked

1 interview with a Ukrainian prisoner

1 Russian ballad with background video of Stalin and Khurushvev.

Followed by a singalong of 8 Russian glitterati, all between the ages of 40-60, plus one white haired codger over 75 in a rousing military song.

[RockRaven]

3. I was listening to a program about WWII the other day and the historian being interviewed made

an aside referring to present-day events... He said that modern Russian army continues to have a organizational characteristic of the Soviet era Red Army, also had by the Russian Imperial army before that, insofar as they have very short basic training for inductees/conscripts compared to European/American armies of the same time period.

They expect to finish training their new recruits into functional soldiers after the recruits reach their units. The brass know the grunts aren't trained up properly upon deployment/assignment. [for clarity - obviously is true to some degree for every military, there is always more training to do, but the bar for minimally-competent-soldier-ready-for-specific-training is set much lower] That's an okay model when you are adding new people to an existing unit full of veterans during peacetime. It's a very bad model when you are taking the fresh recruits, forming them into entirely new units where nobody is properly trained, and sending those units immediately into front line combat (as was being done in the WWII battle/front he was discussing on the program).

How these hundreds of thousands of new soldiers are going to be deployed, organizationally, is something I'd be curious to know.

[Eugene]

4. This time, it's even cruder than that.

Send the troops in. Order them to hold a line. Abandon them.

Lose most of them, and report home that the troops are alive and well.

Within 40 minutes of being dumped on the battlefield, she said, the leadership had failed to return, shelling started, and “battles went on for three days.”

“They didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, and for three days held the line and didn’t run away unlike the command,” she said.

“They tell us over the phone that our sons are alive and healthy, and even fulfilling their military duty. How the hell are they alive and healthy when they were all killed there?” the mother of another soldier told Verstka.

Of a 570 man battalion, 500 were killed. Only 12 got out without serious wounds.

https://news.yahoo.com/command-fled-putin-own-troops-092553394.html