“We are in for a hell of a winter”. “LPR” armed forces serviceman recounts Russian army woes, gets censored by Roskomnadzor • The Insider • RIMA — архив российских независимых медиа
Roskomnadzor removed a blogpost by Moscow-based blogger Andrei Morozov (LiveJournal user Fighting Cat Murz). Morozov has been serving in the “people's militia of the LPR” (the 14th Territorial Defense Battalion “Ghost”) since 2014, where he maintains drones and communication systems. In his piece, Morozov details the problems of the Russian army and criticizes the incompetent command. The material is available via Wayback Machine.
Self-inflicted destruction of tank combat efficiency
Morozov draws attention to videos from the “1st DNR People's Militia Army Corps” with tanks firing from closed positions. According to the blogger, the firing method is practiced on a regular basis, but the Russian army uses tanks instead of artillery “with the catastrophic shortage of shells being covered up”. According to him, such firing is an emergency measure, and smoothbore tank guns are not designed for continuous bombardment of enemy positions with high-explosive fragmentation shells.
“A tank gun barrel has much lower survivability than a rifled howitzer. And the tanks that are used for this are no longer new, the barrels are already well used, so destroying targets from closed positions requires high consumption of shells, which wears down the barrels even more. There was a situation in the LPR, long before the SMO, when one of the units brought their tank barrels to such a condition that further practicing at the range would have deprived the tanks of any combat value, so the unit at the range started practicing from 14.5 mm auxiliary barrels using KPVT machine gun ammunition”.
Besides, the serviceman notes that Russian troops are being supplied with massive amounts of “bald” tanks, with no dynamic protection, even of the old type, and tank drivers are frantically looking for money through volunteers in order to manufacture containers for dynamic protection and fix them on the tanks using welding equipment.
Russian mobilized troops lack comms, AFU strikes them by detecting their cell phones
According to Morozov, one of the main problems of the Russian army is the lack of normal communications equipment. He notes that the mobilized troops are being dispatched to the front like cannon fodder not only without weapons and artillery but also without means of secure digital communication. All that is available is a wired communications plan, for which the troops themselves must find both cable and field telephones. Because of this, mobilized soldiers are using cellular communications, which helps the AFU target the enemy.
“The organizers of mobilization in the Russian Federation drove a lion's share of the mobilized men into “rifle regiments” without heavy weapons and artillery, staffed in the same manner as the Donbass “mobik” regiments. These units, which are completely unmanageable due to their lack of proper command staff and, of course, their lack of communications equipment, are simply designed to devour human resources and provide no combat value. They are simply created for the AFU to pinpoint them by a cluster of constantly switched-on cell phones, to wiretap their analog Baofengs and to hit them point blank, striking at their neighbors, regular troops of the Russian Federation and the Republics, battered after 10 months of war”.
People are thrown into “meat grinders” instead of being prepared for the “AFU’s winter offensive”
The blogger also claims that a large-scale offensive by the AFU will begin in winter (this is not confirmed, Ukraine claims the same about the upcoming offensive of the Russian troops). According to him, instead of preparing troops for it, the command is staging local “mini-Verduns” - battles for small settlements. Morozov cites the battles near Bakhmut as an example. The Battle of Verdun is one of the bloodiest military operations of World War I, a textbook example of a war of attrition.
“The Russian military has an incredible talent for turning any settlement with a couple of fields and a pig farm into Verdun, in order to decimate its own, not enemy’s, troops. <...> Since the Russian army is only able to spill its blood by taking a settlement while surrendering a district center or an entire region on the other flank, it has arrived at an amazing conclusion: let's take more settlements! And it has set up a maximum number of Verduns along the entire length of the front line, including the infamous Pavlovka in the DNR. And, of course, Bakhmut. How else? How can they do but kill off the last remnants of combat-ready infantry? Nothing. Those fucking bastards need to get positive news from somewhere! Well, we've liberated another 100 meters of such-and-such village. And whoever reports first on the total liberation of the village gets a medal.”
Russia has no camouflage for artillery
According to Morozov, the remaining shells for barrel artillery are being spent on those very “mini-Verduns” which the Russian army has been diligently producing one after another, grinding the infantry against them.
“Have the artillery gotten radically more “eyes” in the air during the 10 months of SMO? No. Has the Russian Ministry of Defense supplied sufficient quantities of fall and winter camouflage nets for the artillery? No. And winter is coming. Hiding guns under the tree lines will not be possible anymore - the trees have shed their leaves, and soon the snow will fall, and in general every step will be visible from the air. And the enemy is doing well with UAVs. Even taking into account the losses. On our side, the stupid morons, who had wasted ammunition on plowing the fields, decided to replace six-inch shells with frag grenades dropped from copters. Military minds incapable of anything but the “let's make it like the <Ukrainians>“ cargo cult. They don't think about the fact that what works perfectly well for hunting down lazy careless idiots, will not work the opposite way, especially if executed poorly and hastily.
What’s the bottom line? We're in for a hell of a ride in winter. There will be no significant chance to hold the current frontline, and the enemy knows it very well, concentrating its forces where it deems convenient and advantageous. There is no progress on any of the points which should have been addressed to ensure the success of the defense; there’s only regress, encouraged by the system.
