At one point in our not-so-distant past, Russia was believed to have one of the most mighty and frightening military forces on the planet. Today? Not so much.
A great deal of this reputation was already stale at the fall of the Soviet Union, having been cultivated by the happenstance of being the folks to find Hitler’s body in Berlin, as well as Hollywood Cold War movies that made the Red Army out to be the only fighting force on earth that could challenge the USA.
As it turns out, this was all pure bluster and bluffing, and the reality of the situation is that Vlad Putin send 70-year-old tanks into Ukraine and was then forced to buy drones and munitions from Iran and North Korea respectively.
Now, in a further bit of embarrassment, Russian reservists are simply refusing to sign their contracts to go to war, as they watch Moscow’s military getting their backsides handed to them by the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainian government says demoralized Russian support officers are refusing to sign up to fight against a weekslong counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces that has reportedly pushed Russian forces back to the countries’ shared border.
In a Tuesday Facebook post, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine claimed the Russian military’s current shortage of tactical commanders is due to the refusal of reserve officers to sign contracts to return to the front amid the Ukrainian military’s reported battlefield success.
The revelation was damning for the Kremlin.
“The level of moral and psychological condition of the opponent’s personal composition continues to decrease,” the general staff said in the statement. “The practice of self-calling is increasingly widespread among the occupiers to get treatment in a medical facility and avoid participating in combat in Ukraine. A large part of the military personnel do not return to the military units after the end of their vacation period.”
The news comes as Ukrainian forces have pushed the Russians back to their own border, and as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues to suggest that his army will seek to retake Crimea from Russia as well, after Putin annexed the region back in 2014.
