From the Russian front lines in Ukraine comes word of another military disaster for authoritarian thug and war criminal Putin:
Hours after Aleksei Agafonov arrived in the Luhansk region on 1 November as part of a battalion of new conscripts, his unit were handed shovels and ordered to dig trenches throughout the night.
Their digging, which they took turns to do because of the lack of available shovels, was abruptly interrupted in the early hours of the next day as Ukrainian artillery lit up the sky and shells started raining down on Agafonov and his unit.
“A Ukrainian drone first flew over us, and after that their artillery started to pound us for hours and hours, nonstop,” Agafonov, who survived the shelling, told the Guardian in a phone interview on Monday.
“I saw men being ripped apart in front of me, most of our unit is gone, destroyed. It was hell,” he said, adding that his unit’s commanders abandoned them just before the shelling started.
Agafonov was called up on 16 October alongside 570 other conscripts in Voronezh, a city in the south-west of Russia, as part of Vladimir Putin’s nationwide mobilisation push that has seen more than 300,000 men drafted to go and fight in a war that the Kremlin calls its “special military operation”.
After the attacks stopped, Agafonov, with roughly a dozen other soldiers, retreated from the forest outside the Luhansk town of Makiivka to the nearby Russian-controlled city of Svatove. In Svatove, Agafonov and his group moved into a deserted building, trying to contact other mobilised soldiers who had been with him that night.
According to Agafonov’s estimates, only 130 draftees out of the 570 survived the Ukrainian attack, which would make it the deadliest known incident involving conscripts since the start of the mobilisation drive at the end of September...
The on- going failures of what was once considered a formidable conventional war machine provide one of the most dramatic outcomes of Putin's war on Ukraine (another being the cohesion of NATO and the addition of Sweden and Finland to its ranks). The next dramatic outcome might be a critical mass of Russians fed up with conscripts being used as cannon fodder in Putin's "special military operation" that they'd been told would last only for a short period of time:
The incident points to Russia’s willingness to throw hundreds of ill-prepared conscripts on to the frontline in Ukraine’s east, where some of the heaviest fighting has been taking place, in an effort to stem Kyiv’s advances.
There is growing anger in Russia as more coffins return from Ukraine, bringing home the remains of conscripts.
Some of the details surrounding last week’s shelling could not be independently verified. But the Guardian spoke to a second soldier, as well as two family members of surviving soldiers, who gave similar accounts.
“We were completely exposed, we had no idea what to do. Hundreds of us died,” said the second soldier, who asked to remain anonymous. “Two weeks of training doesn’t prepare you for this,” he said, referring to the limited military training conscripts received prior to being sent to Ukraine.
The domestic costs for Putin continuing to throw more conscripts into the Ukrainian meat grinder will continue to grow, and with it will grow Putin's desperation. Every month that goes by brings more evidence of Russia's weakness for the world to see. With winter approaching, don't be surprised to see him seek a pause in the fighting in order to consolidate his position, militarily in Ukraine and politically in Russia. He sees himself as an historic figure playing a long game, and the West must be prepared to counter him and his ethno- nationalist movement for as long as they're standing.
(Photo: all helmet, no military; master of war Putin/ Brookings Institution)
