If Putin’s Victory day speech seemed muted today, the why might be because his military is starting to balk when ordered to carry out perilous offensive operations.
BY JON JACKSON
senior official from the U.S. Department of Defense on Monday said officers in Russian President Vladimir Putin's military have joined soldiers in refusing to follow orders in Ukraine.
During a background briefing, the senior official at the Department of Defense told Newsweek that the agency had received anecdotal reports of poor morale among Russian troops in Ukraine as well as reports that Russian military officers had been disobeying orders. The U.S. government official further characterized the Russian leadership on the ground as not being sound or in control.
The official added that the reports the department has received about Russian dissidence involved mid-grade officers, including some at the battalion level. He said that the reports indicated that some of these officers either refused to obey orders they were given or had not followed through with the orders to the level at which they had likely been expected to respond.
Since the beginning of Russia's military attacks on Ukraine on February 24, there have been reports of low troop morale among Russian forces. On March 1, The New York Times wrote that a Pentagon official said entire Russian units, some full of young conscripts, had laid down their weapons rather than fight Ukraine's forces. Some Russian troops had even sabotaged their own vehicles, according to the story.
BY ELLEN MITCHELL
Russian forces have not made any significant progress in Moscow’s new offensive in eastern Ukraine, a situation partly due to poor morale and some troops “refusing to obey orders,” a senior U.S. defense official said Monday.
“We still see anecdotal reports of poor morale of troops, indeed officers, refusing to obey orders and move and not really sound command and control from a leadership perspective,” the official told reporters.
The official later said “midgrade officers at various levels, even up to the battalion level” either have refused to obey orders “or are not obeying them with the same measure of alacrity that you would expect an officer to obey.”
These prisoners are probably the relatively lucky ones:
This refusal to carry out orders are partly responsible for the glacial rate of Russian advances during their offensive in the East. To what extent we doen’t really know.
Now it looks like they are trying to find all the long range artillery they can.
Meanwhile:
Here’s a Fly-By on Victory Day, Ukrainian style:
Men in occupied Donbass go into hiding as Russia sweeps streets of males - Putin threatens Moldova
Vladimir Putin now faces a predicament similar to the one Tsar Nickols faced in the First World War when the Russian Army’s morale was so bad that whole units would munity. Like Putin, Nickols made himself supreme commander in charge of the conduct of the war, a disastrous blunder for both of them politically and militarily. And like in 1917 this could well hasten the end of the war.