These are mobilized Russian soldiers (mobiks), meaning they are untrained men who were forced to join up with little training or equipment. For the second time this month, a group of mobiks have made a video saying they are being sent to the front lines to be slaughtered.

In the latest video, published Saturday, the group claimed they had been given “unlawful and criminal orders” from their command and sent to battle without “any support.”

“We are the mobilized from Irkutsk oblast (region), regiment 1439, who were sent to the (self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic) from the city of Novosibirsk on December 31, 2022,” said a hooded soldier reading a message and surrounded by other soldiers.

“We ask for help in dealing with the unlawful and criminal orders of our command … the soldiers of the territorial defense were made into assault units in a single day and were sent to assault the Avdiivka stronghold — without any support from artillery, communications, sappers, reconnaissance — to be slaughtered.”

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“DPR commanders are firing machine guns and infantry fighting vehicles at our mobilized soldiers because (they) refuse to join the assault units. There is no point in appealing to the local military prosecutor’s office since they are in full collusion with the commanders … At this point, this battalion has been almost completely destroyed,” the hooded soldier continued.

In case that’s not clear, DPR commanders are their own people. Those are the ones firing machine guns at anyone who refuses to join the “assault units.” The video ends with the soldier saying it’s clear the “commanders do not care” about their lives. That, of course, is undeniably true. The commanders care about their own futures which are in doubt if they don’t provide Putin with some apparent progress on the battlefield.

The NY Times published a story on this topic today titled “Russia’s New Offensive Sends Conscripts Into the Teeth of Ukraine’s Lines.”

“Every day, sometimes more than once a day, small groups come forward and try to take our positions,” said one of the Ukrainian soldiers who participated in the fight, and who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Diesel, for security reasons.

For months, military analysts have been anticipating that the Russian military, under pressure from President Vladimir V. Putin, would seek to regain momentum in the war as the first anniversary approached. A recent series of attacks along the front lines in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine were at first regarded as exploratory thrusts. But increasingly, they are seen as the best the exhausted Russian forces can manage.

“Russia’s big new offensive is underway,” said Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, in an interview last week with the Ukrainian edition of Forbes magazine. “But going in a way that not everyone can even notice it.”…

Experts are growing increasingly doubtful that Russia will offer much more of a threat in its latest offensive than what Diesel and his mates have been seeing for about a month now.

I started writing about the coming spring offensive by the Russians weeks ago. And I expected it would be a carefully strategized effort. But it really does appear that these pathetic efforts of sending mobiks to their deaths is probably what they can manage at this point. Diesel, the Ukrainian soldier described above said he recently saw two Russians walking across a field, apparently unaware the Ukrainians could see them. “They looked like they were out picking mushrooms,” he said. This is what Russia has left to fight with. A bunch of frightened, inexperienced men who know they are being sent to slaughter.