Posted on 09/21/2014 8:00:42 AM PDT by 1rudeboy
Giving lie to Vladimir Putin’s claims that Russia isn’t fighting in Ukraine, up to 80 Russian troops were killed in a skirmish there last month, according to information released by an opposition politician.
Members of an elite Russian paratroop force talked about the brutal battle near Luhansk, a city in eastern Ukraine, in telephone transcripts leaked to politician and newspaper publisher Lev Shlosberg.
“We’re —— walking along looking for these —– Ukrainians,” one paratrooper says in an account reported by the Sunday Times of London.
“We get out into the open and are seen, kapow!” the paratrooper says.
“We dashed out onto the road, there was a field, sunflowers, and a checkpoint,” he continues. “They started to bomb it — bam bam bam — and they destroyed it.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Shlosberg’s newspaper reported in August on the funerals of two 76th Guards paratroopers, Leonid Kichatkin and Alexander Osipov.
Kichatkin’s widow, Oksana, announced her husband’s funeral on her social media page. When reporters began asking about her husband, the post was replaced with one claiming he “is alive and well.”
And when reporters called the Kichatkin home, the phone was answered by a man pretending to be Oksana’s dead husband.
Yikes! Obama only dreams of this kind of creative narrative “shaping”. No wonder he’s so prickly about Putin’s taunts.
When you lose 80 of your most elite soldiers in a battle, then something serious is going on.
OTOH maybe the man answering the phone was her husband, alive and well, and the story is all entirely bogus.
And maybe you’re not 1rudeboy. Prove otherwise.
That’s what corroborating witnesses are for, Sophocles.
Serious as in major combat losses, and when you just lost 80 (out of 90) men from your most elite attack forces, then you are engaged in real combat.
When was the last time the United States lost 80 men in a day, and lost an entire company of it’s most elite soldiers in a single skirmish?
This is Russia’s most advanced and well equipped and trained, men of the generally backwards Russian military.
You don’t seem to have read the article.
I believe there is a small chance this war will lead to Putin’s fall. There is a rather larger chance that it will be the mechanism for the rise of an old time Russian Autarchy. Does Putin have a son?
Elite troops who have been lied to about what sort of project they are engaged in lose much of the benefit of their intense special training. Even if they can make good guesses they cannot be sure of what is going on at any given moment.
Putin’s not going anywhere. He has the power that Obama can only dream of . . . .
You know, this is why I’m beginning to question the state of Russian military readiness.
Those who say Poopin is a wise fox, really aren’t paying attention.
He has just about destroyed his armed forces credibility here.
That is what I think also.
This is like a WWII battle loss, yet it was his best of his military that is receiving the modernization and attention, that is supposed to make some of his units equal to NATO ground forces that was wiped out.
Putin is not able to contain what is happening in Ukraine from the Russian people. The Russian people and the military are his biggest problem.
At least publicly, that seems to be the case.
Last time 76th lost 80 men KIA was an Ulus Kert battle in Spring 2000. It was primarily a result of bad leadership at a company level, a negligent underestimation of opposing force but this battle actually led to a winning of active phase of a Second Chechen War. Still, despite the great strategic victory, government was in a hot water over a massive loss of like unseen since WWII.
Keep in mind that we are talking about a unit stationed in a small city (or a large town) and everything revolves around their airbase there. Half of the population are active or retired airborne or their extended families.
You simply can’t conceal such a loss of life this way in such a place ever, especially when we are talking not about a popular war but an incompetent deployment into an illegal conflict with uncertain objectively which almost none, including military personnel would support.
If it was really happening the way they are saying these people would already knew it and have been storming Defence Ministry and Kremlin as we speak.
Not to mention alleged late August battle was heavily advertised by the Ukrainian MoD as a ‘Russian convoy wiped out’ but when I went for a video of aftermath it was all about a wrecked machinery most are unique to Ukrainian military (such as late model KRAZ army trucks and engineering vehicles based of their chassis, US-made HUMVEEs, old Soviet vehicles written-off from the Russian military a decade ago). A scene was complete with Ukrainian-uniformed corpses and live rebels, scavenging for ammo and repairable equipment on site.
I’m really pity for the Ukies if it is how they believe have wiped out a 76th’s convoy. The rebels have screwed them again plain and simple.
I assure that no matter how wrong the things they are doing in Kiev in my opiniob, I sincerely believe it doesn’t worth to take arms and start killing them. If I would receive an order like that I simply won’t do a thing and most the military personnel wouldn’t follow for sure. It simply doesn’t make any sense.
It looks like your boys got burned pretty bad.
Not a good sign for what is supposed to be some of the rare decent soldiers of the Russian military.
Nope, I don’t believe it is true. If it has really happened it won’t be a secret for long and it would mean Putin is no better than Obama.
It isn’t a secret, the New York Post has reported it, until we get a better source, we can accept that the story shows more of the Russian clumsiness in war.
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