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Why Putin’s Army Is A Disaster
A former Russian soldier’s diary exposes the rot from within
Vladimir Putin’s army is a shambles.
For months American and other media have been documenting the rot at its core during the 2022 war in Ukraine: low morale, food and fuel shortages, poor leadership and logistics, and desperate efforts to fill out its ranks by recruiting prisoners.
A Russian town builds a ‘wall of shame’ for soldiers
The disasters keep coming. A Ukrainian commander said Kremlin soldiers “fled like Olympic sprinters” during a counteroffensive near Kharkiv. In a town in southeastern Russia, military leaders built a “wall of shame” with the names of hundreds of men who refused to fight or otherwise disobeyed orders in the war.
Yet perhaps the most vivid and intimate account of the dismal performance of the Russian army has appeared on social media. It’s a 141-page diary posted on VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, by Pavel Filatyev, a former Russian paratrooper.
‘Soup’ for soldiers was raw potatoes in water
Filatyev spent more than a month at war before being injured and evacuated. With the help of human rights activists, he fled to France and has…
