‘It’s a Sh*tshow’: Russian

Troops Are Now Turning

on Each Other
Allison Quinn
Wed, March 23, 2022, 7:28 PM

Two Russian soldiers have been caught venting about Putin’s

“bullshit” war against Ukraine in an intercepted phone call as
devastating losses reportedly led one soldier to drive over his
colonel with a tank.
“Basically, it’s a shitshow here, I’ll put it that way,” an unnamed
soldier near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine can be heard telling a
colleague in a recording released by Ukraine’s Security
Service late Tuesday.
After telling his friend that Ukrainian forces “tore apart” a column
of Russian forces sent along with his own unit, he described
complete disarray among the Russian military, with 50 percent
of the unit suffering from frostbite on their feet.
“But they don’t plan to treat them in the [field] hospital,” he said.
On the fourth day of their deployment, he said, the general
commanding the unit, General-Lieutenant Yakov Rezantsev,
told them it’d be over quickly.
“Do you know what he told us? ‘It’s no secret to anyone that
there are only a few hours until this special operation is over.’
And now those hours are still going.”
He said soldiers are complaining about having Kevlar vests that
lack the hard-armor panel, but they are ignored.
“‘Comrade General, damn it, I have this situation,’” he recalled
troops telling their leader. “And he just says, ‘Son, be strong,’
and then he fucks off. It’s such trash here… our own plane
dropped a bomb on us,” he said.
“They couldn’t even send off the 200s here,” he said, using a
Russian military term for dead bodies. “They rode with us for
five days.”
“Even in Chechnya, there was nothing like this,” he said,
describing the situation as a “madhouse.”
“This ‘special operation,’ damnit… with respect to homes not
meant to be destroyed… it’s bullshit.”
Even though “on TV” they said the Russian troops were
advancing, they were actually surrounded “on all sides” by
Ukrainian forces, he said.
The damning conversation was released as reports surfaced
that things were so bad for Russian troops that it led one soldier
to attack a colonel he blamed for troop losses.
Ukrainian journalist Roman Tsymbaliuk reported Wednesday
that two tactical groups of Russian soldiers in Makarov, in the
Kyiv region, lost at least half of their men in battles against
Ukrainian forces.
One of the Russian soldiers “blamed the commander of the
group, Col. Yury Medvedev, for the deaths of his friends,”
Tsymbaliuk wrote on Facebook.
“Having waited for the right moment, during battle, he ran over
the commander with a tank as he stood next to him, injuring
both his legs. Now Col. Medvedev is in a hospital in Belarus,
waiting for monetary compensation for combat wounds received
during the ‘special military operation to protect the Donbass.’
Colonel Medvedev was awarded the Order of Courage,” he
wrote.
The Daily Beast could not independently confirm Tsymbaliuk’s
version of events, but Putin lackey and Chechen leader
Ramzan Kadyrov confirmed Medvedev was injured during
fighting in a VK post this month.
Alongside a video of an injured Medvedev being evacuated on
March 11 by Chechen troops sent in to bolster Russian forces,
Kadyrov claimed Medvedev’s rescue was proof of how
successful Putin’s “de-Nazification” of Ukraine was.
“There are no more threats to [Medvedev’s] life. I hope that he
will soon be back on his feet,” he said, before adding that “such
moments on the battlefield bring us together.”