“You can put us in jail!” Russians soldiers fed up with war filmed threatening rebellion
A group of mobilized Russian soldiers sent to fight in Ukraine have threatened to rebel and turn their guns on their commanders according to videos released by the men.
In the first three-minute video released on March 7th, a group of Russian soldiers appealed to Vladimir Putin for assistance, describing their situation after being unwillingly turned into frontline assault troops.
“People are dying for nothing,” one soldier said according to a translation from the independent news agency Ostorozhno Novosti, which published the video of the Russian servicemen’s plea to Putin on their Telegram channel.
The men in the video were mobilized from Kaliningrad, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk and originally trained as territorial defense officers according to Ostorozhno Novosti.
At some point, the mobilized soldiers were removed from their territorial defense duties and turned into frontline assault troops under the command of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
According to Ostorozhno Novosti, the men aren’t refusing to carry out their combat missions in Ukraine, but want to serve “with dignity, and not like meat.”
The Daily Beast’s Allison Quinn picked up the story and wrote that the angry soldiers “shamed top military brass by saying there appears to be no battlefield strategy.”
“This is no way to fight a war,” one of the soldiers said according to Quinn’s translation.
The story of the mobilized soldiers wouldn’t end there, however. In a rare follow-up to a Russian dissatisfaction video, Ostorozhno Novosti was able to obtain and release a second video that revealed the aftermath of the angry soldier’s original plea to Putin.
“You can jail us all! How many years is it, 5, 7, 10? We don’t give a F,” one soldier said as the unit’s commander attempted to get the men to obey their orders to assault a fortified Ukrainian position somewhere along the frontline in Eastern Ukraine.
