Two news stories published Wednesday tell a grim tale of how the Russian war machine broke down over eight months in Ukraine and now can’t be readily fixed by the disastrous partial mobilization declared by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In a special investigative report titled “Russian Roulette,” Reuters reviewed more than a thousand pages of documents left behind by Russian soldiers in their hastily abandoned headquarters in the town of Balakliia which Ukrainian troops recaptured last month in their successful counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region.
Reuters wrote that the documents “detail the inner workings of the Russian military and shed new light on events leading up to one of President Vladimir Putin's most stinging battlefield defeats: Russia’s chaotic retreat from Ukraine’s northeast in September.”
In the weeks before that defeat, Russian forces were struggling with surveillance and electronic warfare. They were using off-the-shelf drones flown by barely trained soldiers. Their equipment for jamming Ukrainian communications was often out of action. By the end of August, the documents show, the force was depleted, hit by death, desertions and combat stress. Two units – accounting for about a sixth of the total force – were operating at 20% of their full strength.
The documents also reveal the increasing effectiveness of Ukraine’s forces and offer clues to how the eight-month-old war might unfold, with Russia now under intense pressure on the southern front around the Black Sea coast. In the weeks before their retreat, Russian forces around Balakliia, a town 90 kilometers south of Kharkiv, came under heavy bombardment from HIMARS rocket launchers, recently supplied by the United States. The precision missiles repeatedly hit command posts.
The successful Ukrainian offensives in the Kharkiv region and the Kherson region in the south prompted a desperate Putin to declare a partial mobilization last month. But that mobilization has been a dismal failure with almost nothing to show for the many lives lost.
The independent Russian news website Meduza, now operating out of Latvia, published an investigative report by another independent media outlet, Mediazona, titled “Written off in advance: How an untrained and unarmed ‘platoon” of new conscripts from Moscow was decimated near Svatove”:
On October 8, a group of new conscripts from the Moscow region recorded an understated but still urgent video, in which they hoped to tell the civilian audience about their circumstances. Their platoon of 30 was about to be sent to Lyman, to take part in a Russian offensive there. The soldiers, dressed in rag-tag uniforms each of them had to put together around retail shops, said that they were going to the front without any training, and with weapons that were “rusty, stuck, or jammed.” With only a day’s worth of firing practice, and no acquaintance at all with the vehicles some of them would have to drive, they felt completely unprepared to be sent to a war “hot spot.” The day after recording the video, the platoon of 30 was sent to the Luhansk region. By October 17, when the video was first published on YouTube, only 13 men were left in the unit. The rest of them were either dead or missing.
In early March, Russian troops occupied Balakliia. Their commander, Col. Ivan Popov and many of his senior officers belonged to the 11th Army Corps, part of the Russian navy’s Baltic Fleet. Popov had served in the war against Chechen separatists and the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia. The Russians were supported by conscripts from the Russian-controlled Ukrainian region of Luhansk.
Reuters reported that the Russian occupiers had an officer, using the apparent pseudonym Commandant V. “Granit” (Granite) responsible for keeping the local population in check. Former detainees and Ukrainian officials told Reuters that this officer and others beat and used electric shocks while interrogating civilians and military veterans.
The Russians turned a rundown repair complex on the outskirts of town into their headquarters for the surrounding region. Russian helicopters and drones constantly circled over the headquarters, and there were also dozens of GRAD rocket launchers and other military vehicles parked nearby.
The Russians used the base and a local police station as a detention center for captured Ukrainian veterans and local civilians. Albina Strilets, a 33-year-old logistics coordinator for the local emergency services, told Reuters that she and other women were held simply for being “pro-Ukrainian.”
“I heard men being beaten so badly that at one point I heard a Russian soldier say, ‘bring a body bag,’” Strilets said. “Another time I heard a woman being raped upstairs and crying for hours.” Strilets said she broke the cell’s toilet so “it sounded like a waterfall” and would block out the woman’s screaming.
The documents reveal that on July 19, the Russian occupiers encountered their first serious attack from Ukrainian forces who fired an artillery barrage to support an advance by a column of soldiers supported by tanks in the nearby town of Hrakove.
The Ukrainians overran some Russian positions and forced some Russian units to retreat. But this time, Russian commanders were able to send in reinforcements and call in attack helicopters, and the Ukrainians withdrew.
But Reuters said the Russians paid a heavy price. They lost a tank, two armored personnel carriers, and other equipment. Seven soldiers were killed, 39 wounded, and 17 were reported missing, according to a report submitted to Popov on July 21. Documents from that period indicated that Russian commanders “understood the shortcomings of their force,” Reuters wrote.
One officer issued a plea for non-military grade drones, available for purchase in stores or online, to track Ukrainian troop movements. A day after the Ukrainian attack, the Balakliia force received three off-the-shelf Mavic-3 quadcopter drones. but their software had not yet been installed and Russian troops still needed to be trained to operate them. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones were busy flying over Russian positions, and the electronic warfare unit reported that two of its three jamming devices were out of action in need of repair.
Reuters reported that the July 21 report to Popov contained even more alarming news. Russia’s FSB intelligence agency said it had learned that Ukrainian forces in the area had received three U.S.-supplied HIMARS missile launchers and had pinpointed the positions of one Russian command post and four warehouses being used by the Balakliia force.
On July 24, a Russian officer recorded in his notebook that a HIMARS strike had killed 12 Russian soldiers, eroding morale and discipline among the Russian troops, Reuters reported. The officer’s notebook, found by Reuters, noted that one soldier had deserted and another had shot himself in the hand to avoid combat.
By the end of July, Russian officers were convinced that Ukrainian forces were preparing a counter-offensive to capture Balakliia, according to the documents found in the bunker. In the weeks that followed, three Russian command posts in northeast Ukraine were hit in HIMARS strikes, Reuters reported.
The documents indicate that the Russian command in Balakliia tried to bring in more troops, but an Aug. 30 spreadsheet showed the force was at only 71% of full strength, with some units reporting reporting as low as 20% of intended manpower.
An equipment tracking spreadsheet showed that by the end of August, the Russian force had only two drones, down from five at the end of July, three armored personnel carriers, down from eight, and four anti-take weapons, down from 24.
One Russian officer, interviewed by Reuters, described the situation in late August as follows:
“There were no supplies of munitions or drones,” he said. Ukrainian forces mounted attacks, but “our artillery was not working in response.”
On Sept. 6, Ukrainian forces launched their surprise counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region. Russian forces were hit with massive artillery barrages and quickly outflanked. They were soon ordered to retreat.
A local resident who formerly managed the repair complex told Reuters that between Sept. 6 and 8, precision strikes hit the command center, which erupted in flames. He said the bodies of dozens of Russian soldiers were pulled from the rubble.
Other local residents said when the strikes ceased on Sept. 8 they saw 30 Russian soldiers, many of them wounded, limping along the road out of Balakliia, and other Russians were seen throwing away their weapons and abandoning their vehicles in a chaotic retreat.
Popov, the Russian commander, was wounded and spent a month in the hospital, his wife told Reuters. He has since been promoted to the rank of general.
Here’s a video showing the scene in Balakliia after its liberation by Ukrainian forces.
Just weeks after the liberation of Balakliia, as Ukraine recaptured thousands of square miles of territory, in the north and south, Putin ordered a partial mobilization on Sept. 21 in a desperate effort to reinforce depleted Russian units in Ukraine.
As Meduza/Mediazona reported, these troops were thrown into battle as cannon fodder, “written off in advance.” They went into combat with minimal training, undermanned and more poorly equipped than what was left of Russia’s original invasion force. The story recounted the experience of a platoon of conscripts who were called up in the first days of the mobilization. The conscripts were first taken to an army base in the Moscow region. The sister of one of the conscripts told Mediazona that her brother had to buy himself a uniform and all the other essential gear.
After a few days, the conscripts went to a base in the Belgorod region, near the Ukrainian border, and from there they were sent to the Russian-annexed Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine. They received nothing resembling adequate training and were assigned to a motorized rifle regiment of the “elite” Taman Division. The Mediazona investigative report said:
By October 9, they had arrived in the vicinity of Svatove, a Ukrainian city in the Luhansk region. There, the command deposited them in a “small grove,” leaving them with a non-working radio, so that the troops had no communication “either with the headquarters, the commander, or the Second or Third platoons.” All in all, there were 30 of them in position, including one BMP mechanic-driver who had never seen his combat vehicle.
In one of the two videos they made, the (First Platoon) soldiers explained that they were barely armed. They had machine guns, but no hand grenades, and no rounds for the RPG launcher. One of the machine guns was broken. Soon the company commander ordered the platoon to “meet the enemy column.” The soldiers objected that they’d never fired an RPG, to which the commander replied: “Why don’t I send you ahead to the first line, and you’ll warm up your weapons right there.”
In the evening on Oct. 12, the First Platoon’s positions came under Ukrainian artillery fire. They then encountered a group of several dozen Russian troops, also recent conscripts, who were retreating and told the platoon that “the battle is lost.”
The platoon members then saw four Russian tanks drive forward toward the front line, but 20 minutes later, the tanks came back with all their lights turned off. One of the recruits said:
“We all jumped up, gathered our guns and bulletproof vests, got our bags, and just followed the tanks.” Their officers tried to stop them from retreating, but when artillery shells began to strike nearby, “they all scattered like cockroaches,” jumping into their vehicles and leaving.
The platoon then retreated about 12-15 miles and by the time they had reached a checkpoint set up by fighters from the Luhansk militia, only 15 of the 30 platoon members were left. They said the Luhansk fighters took away their weapons, bulletproof vests, and helmets, telling the Russian conscripts to “do what you want, just f*** off.”
On Oct. 14, the remaining platoon members got a lift on a Russian armored vehicle to Svatove, where they hid in an empty building for fear they might be ordered back to the front line. Mediazona wrote:
By the time the platoon’s remainder left Svatove together with the other retreating Russian units, there were only 13 of them left. On October 23, Mediazona was able to reach one of the First platoon soldiers, named Vladislav. He told the journalist on the phone that the remainder of the platoon has made it to the army base in the Belgorod region. He also said that the Attorney General, the FSB, and “lots of others” were investigating what had gone wrong in the Taman division.
Vladislav said that he was hopeful about punishing the commanders who sent untrained and practically unarmed new conscripts to the front line. He thought that around 200 other people had filed similar complaints with the Attorney General.
Later that evening, Vladislav told the same journalist that he and his fellow troops “were going somewhere again.” Since then, his phone isn’t answering.
