The situation with newly mobilized Russians, known as mobiks, continues to be bad. Weeks ago there were numerous reports indicating that they were being called up and sent to Ukraine with little or no training and only whatever equipment they could buy for themselves. “We don’t have any training or supplies and our guys showed up in their own uniforms paid for with their own money,” one of the mobiks said in a video that circulated last month.

On top of that, the mobiks were promised they would not be sent to the front lines but would only be used to maintain order in rear areas of Ukraine already under Russian control. But that turned out to be a lie. There were reporters earlier this month that the new recruits were being taken to the front while the Russian mercenaries took up positions behind them.

Not surprisingly this didn’t turn out well. There were reports of massive losses in eastern Ukraine. Soldiers who survived said their officers fled the area almost as soon as the Ukrainian attacks began. As one wife of one of the mobiks put it, they were “left like kittens” and most of them died.

The handfuls who did survive made their way to Svatove and were reportedly refusing to be sent back to the front. Today CNN has a report that is effectively a follow up on those earlier stories. It seems there are lots of mobiks who don’t want to fight and the Russians are treating them like prisoners:

The Astra Telegram channel – a project of independent Russian journalists – reported that 300 mobilized Russians are being held in a basement in Zaitsevo in the Luhansk region for refusing to return to the front line, quoting their relatives.

One woman said her husband had told her: “New people are constantly brought in. They are in a large basement in the House of Culture in Zaitsevo. They feed them once a day: one dry ration to share between 5-6 people. They constantly threaten them.”…

It quoted the wife of one detained soldier as saying: “My husband and 80 other people are sitting in the basement; they were stripped naked in order to confiscate their phones, but one person, fortunately, hid the phone.”

Astra said the men were arrested after retreating from the town of Lyman and then refusing to return to the line of fire.

The issue of sending the mobiks to the front lines continues to anger wives and family members back home. The Moscow Times reports there is ongoing anger at regional governors and the defense ministry.

“Draftees were not supposed to be on the frontline, but they were sent there like cannon fodder,” said Kristina, the wife of one mobilized soldier fighting in Ukraine.

Hundreds of relatives — mostly mothers and wives — have protested across Russia in recent weeks, demanding the authorities withdraw mobilized men from the front. They are usually motivated by desperate phone calls from their sons, fathers, husbands or brothers imploring them for help to escape from unequal battles with the Ukrainian army.

“People are being sent to be slaughtered,” Kristina’s mobilized husband from the Kursk region told her last week in a recorded phone call that she shared with The Moscow Times.

“We started a riot when the battalion commander wanted to send us [to the frontline]. The f***ing Defense Ministry, f***ing put pressure on them. Please, help us!”…

“Our guys are simply… bait for Ukrainians — they are constantly under artillery fire. Only 15% of their group is left alive and they are not even allowed to retreat or to regroup,” said the man, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “The military betrayed us.”…

“When men were drafted the authorities promised not to send them into the thick of things. Now we are hearing the news that our mobilized men are in assault positions,” Irina, who declined to provide her surname, told The Moscow Times.

Finally, another possible sign that Putin is not happy with how the mobilization has been going. Yesterday a Russian colonel who was heavily involved with the mobilization effort was found dead in what authorities have deemed a suicide.

Vadim Boyko is said to have been responsible for working with troops recently called up under Vladimir Putin’s “partial mobilization order” for the war against Ukraine.

He reportedly showed up to work early Wednesday at the Makarov Pacific Higher Naval School in Vladivostok—and then was found with at least one gunshot wound.

Some media reports confirmed it was suicide, i.e. a single shot to the temple. But a Russian Telegram channel described a very different scene.

The channel, citing unspecified sources, said multiple gunshots were heard outside Boyko’s office just before the desk sergeant went in and found his body with five gunshot wounds to the chest.

Five shots to the chest does not sound like suicide and no suicide note was found. In any case, the mobilization continues to be a point of weakness for Putin rather than a great help to his war effort.