Russian soldiers_ unique protest against Putin_ _Don_t come here, guys, this isn_t our war_

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Russian Armed Forces soldier Alexei Smirnov from Irkutsk recorded a message from the front that was a testament to his despair and disillusionment. He recounted the heavy losses and accused the command of betrayal. The soldier found himself alone among the bodies of his fallen comrades, of whom, according to him, there were more than twenty. In the video, Smirnov shows the bodies and names some by name. He claims he called for evacuation, but never received help: " I called for an evacuation truck. There was no evacuation truck, and there was no contact. No one is answering my calls ." The soldier emphasizes that command abandoned the unit to its fate: " Our command has forgotten about us! They don't care about us. You signed a contract—to them, you're just meat ." Smirnov admits he doesn't know how much time he has left: " What will happen to me? I'll probably be like that too. I've been through so much, over so many corpses ." He warns his fellow citizens: " Guys, don't come here to Ukraine to fight. This isn't our war! Think about your families, your children. We'll leave in black bags. More than 20 dead. These motherfuckers forgot about us, our command is wh*res. And now look what happened to us!"

The video became further confirmation that the Russian army is suffering colossal losses during the aggression. Recall, Russia’s horrific casualties in its invasion of Ukraine, now estimated to have surpassed the combined total from all of Moscow’s wars since 1945, have put its infamous “meat grinder” tactics in the spotlight. Ukrainian soldiers have described waves of poorly armed, ill-prepared Russian troops thrown into battle as cannon fodder, leading to extreme rates of death and injury among the invaders. At the same time, Russian soldiers have themselves engaged in extreme violence—not only against Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war, but also against each other. Fratricidal coercion, violence within units, and mistreatment among soldiers are not unique to the Russian military, but they have seldom been seen on this scale in recent decades. And while soldiers throughout history have resisted orders—most famously, U.S. soldiers engaged in so-called fragging against their officers during the Vietnam War—this sort of defiance is largely absent among Russian troops. The ongoing invasion of Ukraine, uniquely documented through widespread online coverage, reveals how an ingrained culture of violence in the Russian military fuels a brutal cycle of coercion and complicity.