‘Coffins Are Already Coming’: The Toll of Russia’s Chaotic Draft
“They are giving them at best basics and at worst nothing and throwing them into combat, which suggests that these guys are just literally cannon fodder,” said William Alberque, a specialist in the Russian armed forces and the director of the arms control program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a research organization based in London.
Elsewhere, scores of relatives of freshly drafted Russian soldiers crowd outside a training center, passing items through its fence to the recruits — boots, berets, bulletproof vests, backpacks, sleeping bags, camping mats, medicine, bandages and food.
“This is not how it’s done,” a woman named Elena told the news outlet Samara Online. “We buy everything.”
Despite draconian laws against criticizing the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Russian social media is awash with scenes like those above captured in widely circulating videos. Such posts are taking the Ministry of Defense to task for acting just as Western military experts predicted: rushing thousands of newly drafted, untrained, ill-equipped soldiers to Ukraine, too desperate to plug holes in its defensive lines to mold the men into cohesive units.
In theory, the draft was of men in the reserves with military skills that needed refreshing, but in practice it pulled in virtually anybody, critics said.
“The result of the mobilization is that untrained guys are thrown onto the front line,” Anastasia Kashevarova, a military blogger who has supported the war, wrote in an angry post, one of several such broadsides.
“Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow — zinc coffins are already coming,” she added. “You told us that there would be training, that they would not be sent to the front line in a week. Were you lying again?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/16/world...raine.html
“They are giving them at best basics and at worst nothing and throwing them into combat, which suggests that these guys are just literally cannon fodder,” said William Alberque, a specialist in the Russian armed forces and the director of the arms control program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a research organization based in London.
Elsewhere, scores of relatives of freshly drafted Russian soldiers crowd outside a training center, passing items through its fence to the recruits — boots, berets, bulletproof vests, backpacks, sleeping bags, camping mats, medicine, bandages and food.
“This is not how it’s done,” a woman named Elena told the news outlet Samara Online. “We buy everything.”
Despite draconian laws against criticizing the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Russian social media is awash with scenes like those above captured in widely circulating videos. Such posts are taking the Ministry of Defense to task for acting just as Western military experts predicted: rushing thousands of newly drafted, untrained, ill-equipped soldiers to Ukraine, too desperate to plug holes in its defensive lines to mold the men into cohesive units.
In theory, the draft was of men in the reserves with military skills that needed refreshing, but in practice it pulled in virtually anybody, critics said.
“The result of the mobilization is that untrained guys are thrown onto the front line,” Anastasia Kashevarova, a military blogger who has supported the war, wrote in an angry post, one of several such broadsides.
“Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow — zinc coffins are already coming,” she added. “You told us that there would be training, that they would not be sent to the front line in a week. Were you lying again?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/16/world...raine.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
