All that remains is rubble and ashes: On New Year’s Eve, 89 Russian soldiers were rescued from the collapsed rubble of a reinforced concrete building in the Ukrainian city of Makiivka after a rocket attack. Lieutenant General Sergey Sevryukov announced this in Moscow on Wednesday. The actual number of casualties could be higher – Ukraine even spoke of 400 killed and 300 injured.
According to Sevryukov, the Ukrainians knew that there were Russians in the building because some soldiers used their mobile phones on New Year’s Eve despite the ban. But some military bloggers have criticized this blame game.
It is quite unusual for Russian military bloggers to criticize the commanders. Because they usually stand behind the Kremlin boss and report in the sense of his propaganda. But the fact that their own soldiers are burned in this way also goes against the tide of the patriots.
There is a lack of cannon fodder
According to pro-Russian military blogger Aleksandr Kots, Russian SIM cards should not have worked in Donetsk. “But of course it’s easier to blame the dead themselves for everything,” he writes Twitter.
But that’s not the only problem of mobilization. The mobilized Russians would not even be placed in the posts for which they had been trained. An example: someone who is trained for artillery can still end up as cannon fodder in the infantry. “All training is free and an unprepared unit is sent to the front,” Kots writes.
Also on Twitter several combatants stated that they had been sent to the wrong place. They asked Putin and those responsible to be transferred to the right place. This mess plays right into the hands of the Ukrainians. For example, it happens that people are shot at or at their own people, several soldiers complain in tapped telephone conversations.
Putin always finds a scapegoat
Meanwhile, Putin was silent. “It is a traditional strategy. Scapegoats are sought for failures,” says Ulrich Schmid, Russia expert at the University of St. Gallen. And such a scapegoat is always found. It is the authorities or the commanders – in case of Makiivka, it was the soldiers themselves. “Their fate is now a warning to all soldiers in the Russian army,” says Schmid.