From the BBC: What do we know about Russian soldiers?

[Tomconroy]

Interesting thread, including the comments.

Link to tweet

[Scrivener7]

1. It is very interesting, but I'm with the guy who replied that none of it explains their war crimes.

Which appear to be rampant. An bestial.

[Phoenix61]

2. They also don't have the funds to bribe their

way out of conscription. I’m curious what will happen when the people who used to have the funds to keep their sons out of the army no longer can.

[BeyondGeography]

3. And the republics where these soldiers are from will be even more under-funded because of the war

This is leading to predictions of major problems in the provinces. Before the war a retired Russian general said this:

In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that invading Ukraine would be “pointless and extremely dangerous.” It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten “the existence of Russia itself as a state.”

To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, since few imagined that an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance stalls in Ukraine, the prophecy looms large. Reached by phone this week, the retired general who authored the declaration, Leonid Ivashov, said he stood by it, though he could not speak freely given Russia’s wartime censorship: “I do not disavow what I said.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/world/europe/putin-russia-military-planning.html

After WWI, independence movements broke out all over French and British colonial empires because they had seen their masters up close, fighting and dying for them, only to return home to second-class treatment. Those who forget the past…