[MarkSheppard]

Posting this here for this so that we don't have 50,000 threads on the War in Ukraine.

Apparently a former RU paratrooper has written a 141 page memoir of his service in Ukraine and posted it on VK.com

I'll summarize the things that stood out for me from a twitter thread going through it:

https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/stat...22545356791810

19/ Parachute jump practice finally took place in November 2021, but it was another fiasco. Several days were wasted packing parachutes "from morning until 21:00," as it turned out that half of the company did not know how to do it.

20/ The soldiers set off for their jump practice at 02:00 in sub-zero conditions, travelling on open-top trucks. They spent five hours "jumping on the spot ... to warm up somehow". When they jumped, Filatyev found that the drop zone had mistakenly been centred on a cemetery.

21/ Fortunately, Filatyev writes, "it's good that the weather was good, everyone taxied out, no one landed on a cross or anyone's grave." But after he got back to base, he found that he had contracted pneumonia in both lungs, with many comrades also falling ill.

22/ He was sent to a military hospital where he spent a week recovering. While there, he found that his company commander had attempted to cover up his stay in the hospital, presumably to avoid awkward questions about why so many of the unit's members fell sick at once.

23/ By this time, Filatyev was fed up. He wrote a detailed complaint to the Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) outlining the many violations of regulations and the poor military ethos that he saw, as well as the almost complete lack of training provided to the troops.

24/ "An atmosphere of apathy reigns among contract servicemen," Filatyev complained, "and 90% of them are discussing in the smoking rooms how to finish their contract as soon as possible ... I also heard from a number of officers that they don't want to serve here."

25/ There was also little esprit de corps among the men. "The Russian and airborne unit flags [looked] as if they had gone through a war (only a fortnight ago they were replaced) and the unit staff ... patched them up because there was already a hole in the hole".

26/ The unit raised the flags every morning accompanied by the Russian national anthem, but as Filatyev notes sardonically, "half the servicemen do not sing it". He wrote that "the duty and anti-terrorist units are on duty only on paper" and did not attend morning roll calls.

27/ Filatyev told the MOD that what he had observed over the past 3.5 months "horrifies me ... in fact, I see complete anarchy, there is only a faint hint of combat readiness, [and] I hear a lot of ridicule among the local population about Feodosia VDV [airborne troops]."

28/ Things got worse when Filatyev's unit was reorganised just before the war (in December 2021), becoming the 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment. But it was a regiment only in name, consisting of 2 battalions and a reconnaissance company equivalent in numbers to a platoon.

...

The units were grossly undermanned on the eve of the war. His own 2nd Airborne Assault Battalion consisted of three companies of 45-60 people each (165 in total), and the amphibious assault battalion also consisted of 165 people. But on paper they had 500 people.