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[bloop_bleep]

The Russian Army: the two rats you found in the foxhole to mitigate the personnel shortage, a tampon to mitigate the bullet holes, and a bottle of vodka to mitigate the brain.

How pathetic is it to so easily accept the idea of dying for people you know are idiots and criminals? I mean, how lowly can one value one's own life?

[martinuzz]

Interesting intercepts from russian conscripts showing their fatalistic mindset

Why the f**k they send you back if the wound on your leg was stitched up only 1 week ago?

I've had one crippled military dwarf beat a whole siege to death using only his crutch. He was my Special Operative.

The Russian army needs combat crutches.

[hector13]

The Russian Army: the two rats you found in the foxhole to mitigate the personnel shortage, a tampon to mitigate the bullet holes, and a bottle of vodka to mitigate the brain.

How pathetic is it to so easily accept the idea of dying for people you know are idiots and criminals? I mean, how lowly can one value one's own life?

What do you think they do to deserters?

[bloop_bleep]

Not much if nobody can follow them over the front line.

Besides, who are they going to send after them if they have 50 people in a battalion? The aforementioned rats?

[hector13]

Why would they go over the frontline? Would you abandon everything you ever knew, never mind to be taken prisoner by a group of people you’re told will torture and kill you just for being Russian?

[Strongpoint]

Why would they go over the frontline? Would you abandon everything you ever knew, never mind to be taken prisoner by a group of people you’re told will torture and kill you just for being Russian?

You keep pretending that it is the early 20th century with no sources of information except state propaganda. Believe it or not, those soldiers have mobile phones and the internet. They also often have relatives\friends\acquitances from the other side to ask. At the very least they have enough info to assume that there is a chance that killed and tortured may be not true and it is worth the risk.


One recent event is a grim illustration of Russian mentality for me:
Russian soldier was found hanged in one of the occupied Ukrainian cities. The stated reason of the suicide that he was being raped by Kadyrovets. A guy who had full access to an assault rifle, hand grenades, etc... just decided to silently kill himself instead of some kind of rebellion or revenge

[hector13]

If they have access to devices with information against state propaganda, they have access to devices with information about Yevgeny Nuzhin, the guy who defected to Ukraine, was traded back to Russia in a prisoner swap, then promptly executed by the Wagner Group.

Again, though, at what point do you give up everything you have ever known, knowing your actions will probably result in punishment on whatever loved ones you have back home, and you’ll probably never be able to go back?

[Strongpoint]

Russia is not North Korea (yet) and there is no punishment for loved ones. And we are discussing the situation when your options are either A dying or B doing something and having a chance of not dying. Being dead will also prevent you from ever coming back.

[Starver]

Believe it or not, those soldiers have mobile phones and the internet.

I suspect that this (in context of access to wider-world information and dispiriting calls back home to their relatives) was actually a major factor in blaming soldiers' phones for the recent attack.

"It's for your own safety, and the greater good of Russia, to isolate yourself from everything but your military commanders!"


TBH, that's something all armies would prefer, and many tried, through blue-penned (or snipped out - so best only to write on one side of the paper) censoring of mail to and from the front-line as the compromise for morale reasons, both at the war-front and home-front. Which is the kind of industrial effort that has been grossly outpaced by the technical capabilities of livestreaming unfettered realities. State sanctioned channels of communications would be highly prefered by those at the head of of the war-machine, though not by those at the coal-face.

Spoiler: e.g., from WW1 (British) (click to show/hide)

(...noting that a practically identical layout was used for "I am well" postcards from Pearl Harbor, immediately after the attack.)
And this all-in-one WW2 solution (US, but again pinched from us Limeys ) to bulk mail, with the anti-espionage 'features' of being duplicated beyond the means of using microdots/invisible ink that might escape the ubiquitous censors' strict and curt attention.

Though there were "Addressee code tricks" that you could still pull (developed from the ones used in the "pay on receipt" days of mail, to avoid shelling out on letters that already had conveyed their main message just by how they looked), if arranged in advance. e.g. if to "Mrs Martha Smith", your mother knew you actually were feeling well, "Mrs M. Smith" revealed that you had a non-worrying injury, and further variations on from there. (My google-fu is failing to find anything about it, within the mountains of info on how to send mail to serving soldiers of various nations... But I'm sure it's a known trick. So much so that I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it has been 'locked down' by one or other military postal service by only allowing a 'registered' contact-detail to ever be used, per recipient, under the guise (maybe) of handy pre-printed stationary, per instance, "for everyone's convenience". Not that there aren't ways round that, of course.)

[Starver]

...ps, I wandered onto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Courier_Service_(Russia) whilst thinking about the above reply (not enough - I made several post-posting edits, ironically!) and it has the appearance of a near-direct translation with so many niggly grammatical/syntactical problems and an awkward prose style. I don't know if anyone wants to try to improve it, preferably anyone with more passing knowledge of the subject than myself, given that I'd probably introduce errors by misunderstanding what had been (mis)written already.

[martinuzz]

Ukrainian forces claim they have killed 800 Russian soldiers in the past 12 hours.

[Strongpoint]

Ukrainian forces claim they have killed 800 Russian soldiers in the past 12 hours.

You mean 24, right? I always wonder how accurate are those. One should never be too eager to trust someone's claims about enemy losses. On other hand, Bakhmut alone is a bloodbath.

[KittyTac]

Panic and depression are hell of drugs. I don't blame that guy for just hanging himself. Realistically in that situation I'd have probably just shot myself, or pulled the pin on a grenade and put it in my mouth. I wouldn't be in the mental state to "rebel".

[Lord Shonus]

TBH, that's something all armies would prefer, and many tried, through blue-penned (or snipped out - so best only to write on one side of the paper) censoring of mail to and from the front-line as the compromise for morale reasons, both at the war-front and home-front. Which is the kind of industrial effort that has been grossly outpaced by the technical capabilities of livestreaming unfettered realities. State sanctioned channels of communications would be highly prefered by those at the head of of the war-machine, though not by those at the coal-face.

That sort of thing wasn't just for morale reasons, and morale probably wasn't even a primary factor. You can get an incredible amount of information from even genuinely innocent comments, so if your letter home gets somehow read by the enemy - your family member shares it with somebody that happens to be a spy, it gets read in church where somebody is a spy, it gets read on local radio and picked up by a Japanese boat because radio transmissions are funky that way, etc- you can reveal a lot.

Even for something like Pearl Harbor, the exact results of the attack would be classified as much as possible as long as possible to try hiding a success from the enemy. Because if they know there's only two carriers to chase them, they'll act differently than if they think there's four or five superdreadnoughts left.

[Strongpoint]

So, Russia begs for a free day to resupply and reinforce... I mean they proposed a ceasefire for the orthodox Christmas...

I hope our leaders aren't idiots and won't fall for this primitive trap