CNN highlighted this video yesterday which comes from a Ukrainian journalist. They haven’t independently confirmed the contents but the video appears to shows Russian soldiers who are near the front lines complaining about the complete lack of supplies and training.

“The sent us here without any training, without anything at all,” the soldier said. He added, “We don’t have any training or supplies and our guys showed up in their own uniforms paid for with their own money.”

A second soldier said, “We have no weapons, no ammo bags, no grenades, no belt pouches, no food, no water. It’s absolute f**king hell. Who the hell knows. Long live the goddamned Russian Army.”

Again, this hasn’t been confirmed but it does seem to jibe with other reports. Just a week ago, the Guardian reported something very similar to what the soldiers are saying in this video clip.

When her recently mobilised brother rang from the frontline last week, Olesya Shishkanova recorded the phone call – and with it, a litany of complaints.

“They gave us absolutely no equipment. The army has nothing, we had to buy all our gear ourselves,” complained Vladimir, 23, who was conscripted as part of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation earlier this month.

“I even had to paint my gun to cover the rust. It is a nightmare … Soon they’ll make us buy our own grenades,” he added in the call that Shishkanova uploaded on her page on the Russian social media site VK…

“It is bad enough that our men are being taken from us,” said Anastasia, a teacher from Bryansk, a Russian city less than 100 miles from the border with Ukraine.

“We had to spend our monthly salary on my husband’s gear so that he at least has a chance to come back. Frankly, it is completely embarrassing. It is a mess,” she said.

The official story is that the Russian Army is supplying conscripts with weapons but just two days ago ABC reported that Putin was pressing for more weapons productions in the face of delays.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, facing military production delays and mounting losses, urged his government Tuesday to cut through bureaucracy to crank out enough weapons and supplies to feed the war in Ukraine, where a Western-armed Ukrainian counteroffensive has set back Russia’s forces…

The Russian military’s shortfalls in the eight-month war have been so pronounced that Putin had to create a structure to try to address them. On Tuesday, he chaired a new committee designed to accelerate the production and delivery of weapons and supplies for Russian troops, stressing the need to “gain higher tempo in all areas.”

Russian news reports have acknowledged that many of those called up under a mobilization of 300,000 reservists Putin ordered haven’t been provided with basic equipment such as medical kits and flak jackets, and had to find their own. Other reports have suggested that Russian troops are increasingly forced to use old and sometimes unreliable equipment and that some of the newly mobilized troops are rushed to the war front with little training.

There was a 27-minute video of Russian soldiers which has now been made private but this thread describes some of what is in the video.

1/ More unhappy mobilised Russian soldiers deployed to Ukraine have spoken out about a chaotic mobilisation that has left them on a front line in eastern Ukraine with no training, no usable weapons, no food, no water, no orders and commanders they feel are lying to them. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/yxkpOtda9d

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

4/ After being mobilised they were taken to a location in the Belgorod region (probably the Soloti training range) where "we were placed in a tent, where there was no training, absolutely no allocation, nothing."

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

6/ They were given weapons and ammunition indiscriminately in a chaotic place "where shells were lying around … ammunition in general was unloaded right on the first day on a KAMAZ. And KAMAZ trucks were just crushing them in the mud."

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

8/ "In other words there were just boxes in which were lying damp, wet assault rifles [that were so rusty they looked as if they] have already burned and continue to rust. There is absolutely no seriousness and no organization." Another says: "You cannot even go into battle".

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

In addition to weapons that were not in good shape, the men themselves were not in good shape.

10/ The men themselves were not in good shape, as they had received no physical training before deployment. Some of their group were in a poor physical condition that made them unable to deal with the physical demands of being in the field.

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

12/ "I don't think everybody can run with it. Especially considering the fact that we didn't even have any physical training, we haven't even run with it once."

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

14/ Their only weapons practice session seems to have been put on for show when Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu was visiting for a day. "We had firing on the day when Shoigu came to the Naro-Fominsk firing range, we had it exactly on that day." pic.twitter.com/uvJggSykWM

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

16/ At the tank base, "the commanders were selecting people. That is, if you are good at driving vehicles, either you are good at shooting in vehicles, or you are a scout, or you are a sniper … Simply, "you are a mechanic, get out, go here and there, you are a tank man now"."

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

Another reason for low morale: No one is getting the money they were promised.

18/ A further problem was that the money promised by the government didn't turn up. The soldiers say that they were promised a salary of 250,000-300,000 rubles a month ($4,000-$4,800), but "it all turned out to be a fake."

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

20/ The lack of cash is a critical problem as the men are having to buy their own food from a local shop. "We have not been fed for two days," says one speaker. Another says, "There was no water, there was none."

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

22/ The Moscow city government under Mayor Sergey Sobyanin was supposed to have provided the men with body armour and helmets. But, they say, "we have not seen our equipment," which suggests that they have been sent to the battlefield without any personal protective gear.

— ChrisO (@ChrisO_wiki) October 23, 2022

There’s a lot more in the thread but you get the idea. Here’s the full CNN report including the video mentioned above.