Commanders are shooting their own men for refusing orders, for failing to pay bribes and, sometimes, just for sport.
In scenes of medieval brutality, soldiers are being forced to fight one another to the death. But brutality is not control.
Western officials estimate that Moscow has suffered more than 350,000 casualties – killed or wounded – since February 2022 when Putin’s invasion began.
It is believed to be losing around 1,000 men a day on some sectors of the front they call the ‘meat grinder’.
Some units that began this war 800-strong are returning from the battlefield with fewer than 100 men, the survivors hobbling home without limbs or hope.
It’s a rate of attrition so severe that Moscow has been forced to replace the dead with prisoners, the middle-aged and the disabled, physically and mentally, simply to keep the trenches manned.
Around Avdiivka in the Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, where Russian losses have reached grotesque levels, I’m told that units now speak of their army as a beast feasting on itself.
One Ukrainian intercept recorded two Russian marines talking: ‘We are not fighting a war. We are being fed to it,’ they concluded.
Further north, near Kupyansk, the horror is less deliberate and more chaotic. Here, units composed of convicts, conscripts and half-trained reservists are collapsing from exhaustion and fear. Alcohol runs like lifeblood through the trenches. Paranoia blooms like mould in the damp earth.
In the course of one night attack, a drunken brawl between two groups escalated into a gunfight. When it ended, five Russians were dead, yet no Ukrainian had been within 500 yards of them.
A field medic attempting to intervene was shot through the throat by a Russian soldier screaming that he was ‘a spy’.
Russian-on-Russian fire has reached such levels that Ukrainian officers sometimes hold back when firefights break out in this sector.
‘If they want to thin their own ranks,’ one told me, ‘we let them.’
Verstka, the independent Russian news outlet, has documented dozens of cases of intra-unit violence or executions since mid-2023.
Western intelligence reports paint the same picture. Britain’s Ministry of Defence believes ‘barrier troops’ – stationed at the rear to prevent desertion or retreat – have been deployed to ‘restore discipline through intimidation’.
Military historian Phillips O’Brien notes: ‘The Russians are winning ground only by destroying the army that must hold it.’
Even if they seize more territory, the price is an institution hollowed out by its own brutality – capable of conquest but not control. The rot extends behind the lines as well. Some 40 miles from the front, the Russian city of Belgorod once felt insulated from the war.
Now reports from military police describe dozens of cases of soldiers attacking fellow servicemen – of beatings, stabbings and a reported grenade explosion in a barracks canteen after a fistfight got out of hand.
Every scandal is quickly smothered by Moscow’s censors, of course.
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