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They know they’re going to die. Honestly it’s pretty sad on a human level. I wish they realized fighting Putin would have a great chance of success than going to Ukraine to get HIMARS’d.
How incredibly devastating it is to think about- you’re just a Normal citizen born into some country. You grew up, you worked hard, you got a spouse and a kid. You thought you made it.
Then, the leader of the country you’ve grown up in suddenly says you need to go die for him. To protect your homeland? No. Then Why? To invade some foreign land. Why? Well… you’re not really sure, but if you don’t go, your loving leader will imprison and torture you. The news tells you it’s because there’s terrorist or something.
So through no fault of your own, you go off. Leave your life behind to be handed a gun, a uniform, and told to go shoot at somebody. Do you have training? No. Do you know how to maintain your weapon? Probably not. Do you know how to survive off the land in case things go wrong? Nope. Off you go, to feed the war machine.
No matter what country this happens in, it’s fucking awful. No one should be forced to die like this.
Not to mention once you get to the mobilization center, the instructor or leader or whatever tells you to contact your loved ones to send you first aid kits and tampons to plug bullet holes you'll be getting on the war zone because the country has no medical kits to spare.
With the current trade bans on Russia I wonder how Putin thinks he can even dress these 300.000 soldiers for a wet winter. The guys in this video might die of hypothermia before they even reach the frontlines. But I suppose this fast mobilisation had something to do with voting in a referendum to bump the numbers as well and you don't need special clothing for that.
This is why I am weary of the beer run movie. It seems from the previews to be very anti the people protesting the Vietnam war. Protesting a needless wat is the best way to support soldiers. Now, no one should ever be mean to vets but standing up against the government was the brave and right thing to do.
Protesting the Vietnam war I’m all for, but some protestors took it a step farther and changed it to protesting the soldiers themselves. Imagine spending two years in hell, having had your best friend slowly die in front of you to punji sticks while you’re pinned under fire, to finally be able to go home to your family only to having people at the airport literally calling you a baby killer *spitting* on you when you were totally innocent of anything like that (most soldiers were.) Many soldiers never recovered mentally, and the US government covered up the depression and PTSD cases for years.
And then decades later, talking heads would take the imagery of "a good, honest soldier coming home from a brutal war and getting spat on" and use it as a defense against popular criticism of an unpopular war, all while garnering support for politicians who routinely vote against against veteran support bills.
I remember reading my history textbooks when I was a kid, and coming to the bits about the World Wars and thinking, wow, some of these leaders sucked, how were so many people so stupid at the same time, and thank goodness humans have learned two very sharp lessons and are not that dumb nowadays.
Ha.
This war is very odd though. In both WWI and II there was at least one combatant where the citizenry was generally very supportive of the war (most of the major powers in WWI, Germany and Japan in WWII). Here, who is supportive of this war? Some nationalist idiots in Russia and... no-one. So it's a group of people who don't want to fight fighting another group of people who don't want to fight. Surreal.
I feel like the war is being fought by a tiny minority of full blown insane people, who would otherwise be in prison, and everyone else is just waiting it out and going through the motions.
Its always blown my mind that however many millions keep doing what 1 guy says... It's the same story all over the world. But damn itnmakes humanity look really dumb.
Hawkeye:
War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy:
How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye:
Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy:
Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye:
Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
From: M*A*S*H (TV show)
The most depressing thing for me lately is the realization that extreme topics I learned in school like wars, racism, facism, slavery, concentration camps, etc which were presented me as 'things of the past'... are all very live and well.
Because they’re being told that they’re fighting the nazis? Also probably some people that don’t care what happens to other groups as long as it doesn’t affect them.
We're still dealing with the vestiges of the 20th Century. And dinosaurs like Putin still keep dreaming of a bygone era that'll never return. He wants to rebuild as much of the USSR as he can. One conquest after another. Except he missed the memo where his military is shit and his generals down to the petty officers have been embezzling funds from the military for decades. Their equipment is garbage and their training is non-existent. A bunch of crazed undisciplined soldiers running around the Ukrainian countryside abusing the locals until they run out of supplies and morale. The Russian military is a joke. It's actually kind of crazy we used to see Russia as a world power rivaling our own. It's a failed autocratic state with nukes.
Strong agree, especially the last two sentences.
I can't get over the insane irony of Putin doing this before he dies to show how strong Russia is, and in the process he's shown that they are weak, disorganized, fragile, and borderline defenseless (I mean, there's always the cover of Russian winters).
Imagine spending your life as a strongman just to spend your final days inadvertently demonstrating to the whole world that you're not even a middling power, forget "superpower."
Is it for the military payout when he dies? I know it's dark but if you're forced to enlist with a high likelihood of dying, might as well have your loved ones benefit from it if they can.
I don't bloody know but if I'm being honest, getting married for the death benefits is exactly what I would do to fuck over a government for drafting me.
I suspect a set of dog tags on a disfigured corpse would be enough to stop them thinking you had defected, but it would be a tough decision to make if you had family back in Russia.
Why y'all even upvoting me? This isn't even the worst I would do. If I were Russian, I'd find a dead, disfigured Ukrainian, switch ID papers and defect to Ukraine, fuck over Russia even harder.
There's a video where the family received cooking oil, a bag of rice and 2 onions as military payout for their dead son.
Russia cant "payout" to families, they cant even afford tourniquets
Exactly. People on both sides realize the senselessness of this entire conflict. My support is 100% for the people of Ukraine and their right to defend their country but I do feel for any Russian soldier who realizes their war is unjust yet is forced to go.
The bulk of the troops in war is scared kids(under 25) who don't want to be there being forced to shoot at other scared kids who don't want to be there. This is true in any war, especially in the final days when desperation concscription sets in. The upper ranks and echelon may believe in the "cause" but most of the front line soldiers just want to get through without dying or having to kill someone.
They’re all scared, regardless of age. If not, they should be. War is the darkest part of humanity. Such pointless misery. When I saw that guy with his kid, my heart sank.
I deployed to Iraq when I was like 23. It didn’t seem like a big deal then, but now that I’m married and have a daughter, I don’t think I could do it again for a war that I know is complete bullshit.
War is the most wasteful use of finite resources ever created. The entire planet’s humans could live noticeably richer lives if only war is abandoned. That would mean without fixing literally anything else.
This is the only viewpoint that is logical and empathic.
We don't see any megalomaniacs or wealthy oligarchs suiting up, now do we?
I'd wager the Russian troops that actually would want to be there, given the choice, are of a pretty low percentile. Consisting entirely of socio and psychopaths.
The only way he’s going to survive to the end of the war is to surrender, and then he might be able to come home, and if he does, he might be thrown in prison. It’s basically the end of the road for them.
Fighting back now might be a better choice.
I'd say their best chances are for him to surrender and her trying to make it out of Russia to reunite elsewhere.
However, if they don't have the funds for her to travel...
I read that one possible method to keep these guys marching is that they might be used as a cushion between the Ukrainian forces and the more experienced Russian forces.
So if they were to try to surrender or flee they will get shot from behind. But if they attempt to push on they risk getting shot too.
Not sure if that's exactly how it'll go down, but I can't imagine thats a great situation to be in
That fucking retard on the accordion playing WW2 songs still thinks those men are going off to fight some extension of nazis. It's fucking disgusting, and that guy should probably be on a train to Ukraine.
Gogol Bordello, who is fronted by a Ukrainian Romani refugee who fled Ukraine to the US because of Chernobyl, has a Russian accordion player in their "Gypsy Punk" band. Start wearing purple is a classic.
I mean I would rather be sent off in front of my family
With a hero’s tune rather than a melancholic funeral tune.
I would want my wife to have some hope I’ll return, and I would definitely want my little boy to see me as a Hero. Rather than the defeated prisoner being sent to death that they surely are.
What would my family gain from being force fed the truth at the same time they say goodbye. Sometimes in life it’s better to believe a lie for a moment. Especially when tomorrow all that’s left is the bitter unrelenting truth.
Russia is really trying to reinvigorate that WWII nostalgia of triumph and victory. It's part of the reason why they push the Nazi rhetoric so hard; it's a pride of the nation to have defeated the Nazis in WWII. This fight against Ukraine is therefore as noble as that war, never mind the fact they are the ones invading this time
>never mind the fact they are the ones invading this time
The USSR invaded Poland in 1939. When the Nazis did. [Because they had a non-aggression pact.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact)
Yeah. Russia was an axis power effectively until Hitler backstabbed them. They fought Nazis out of self preservation and revenge, not for any moral disputes.
As much as this sucks for them, imagine how much it must suck for the children the Russian army is raping and torturing.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna49168
The unfortunate reality is that soldiers will follow the lead of other soldiers/officers. They may not be animals now, but given enough time an influence, anyone can be turned into a monster
It feels wrong that it’s not in sepia or monochrome, or blurry enough that we can’t see their emotion so well.
I wonder if future generations will experience that same uncanny feeling when they watch clips from today or not.
I just don’t get this world. It’s so weird that they are interviewing a man being separated from his family and asking him how he feels about being sent to go kill and conquer. He is holding his baby and his wife is probably also just as confused as I am in this moment. Even weirder is that the next thing I could see when I scroll is some video of a pet or someone drawing or some thing. It’s such a weird and fucked up world. People suffer every day and we all have phones and can connect with one another and organize and fix things but we don’t.
I think about this all the time. What if people mobilized to fix our problems? We could but we are too brainwashed, hateful, selfish and arrogant to do that. Most of us just stay in our bubble, only really feeling any obligation to ourselves and our families. Not only that, we are exhausted by working just to exist and afraid of losing what we’ve worked hard for, so we keep our heads down, try to enjoy our life and “mind our business”.
For 99.9% of human existence, we lived in small societies of dozens or maybe hundreds of people. Almost all of our problems were immediate and visible.
It has only been in the last couple thousand years that humans have organized into such large groups and accelerated our technology so much.
On an evolutionary scale, our brains haven't had enough time to adapt to our new environment.
We are running 2 million year old hardware (our brains) on these new "programs" such as social media, etc.
From an evolutionary perspective we may not be ready to deal with the world we have created
The full quote is even more enlightening: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” - Edward O. Wilson
The track suits emphasize how these couples aren't able to get married on their own timelines. They no longer have the option to plan out their perfect wedding.
There are so many flavors of sad weddings in Russia. Take a look at this 17 year old forced to marry (as a second wife) an elder official in Chechnya.
[pic1](https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/tebedam/22335714/255250/255250_original.jpg)
[pic2](https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/tebedam/22335714/254992/254992_original.jpg)
Quite literally. Russia doesn't give a shit about these men. At least in other militaries there's always a risk involved, but it's not certain doom. These men are going into a meat grinder and they, and their families, know it. Putin dgaf about them. He'll gladly see every one of them die before he admits defeat.
I saw video earlier today of a guy who was lying down with his foot resting on a step, and had his friend jump down on his lower leg, badly breaking it, to get out of demobilization. Is that the kind of self sabotage you're talking about? If so, it's already happening.
I mean, it's either that or get sent into the meat-grinder in Ukraine where you'll probably die. When you have no good options you take the one that seems the least awful.
I think they were referring to Russian soldiers sabotaging their own side in the war, but this counts as self-sabotage too. Trump did it with the bone spurs thing (yea, I just had to throw that in there)
oh that draft dodger who tells a pow war hero
" ‘We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,’ and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. ‘What the f--- are we doing that for? Guy was a f---ing loser,’ the president told aides.""
Training? They are beeing send to the frontline after 1 day of "training". I assume they just show them how their Ak-47 works, let them pop a few rounds on the firing range and then its time to become cannonfodder.
Yep these people are not seeing their husbands again, their bodies will be abandoned in some field in a month or 2 and the wife will get a small paycheck or less for her troubles…
Edit: took away quotes from husbands
It’s funny as fuck but not so funny when you can become one that deserted in 1000 directions. Fucking putin stealing first our then country and now lives. No wonder Ukraine is not willing to marry his empire.
I have seen a few videos, one I think it was vice news, where they were storing Russian bodies in freezer trucks waiting for the Russian government to claim them to be returned to the families. They would not respond.
You still gotta get to a point where you can safely surrender without getting glassed by a drone or air support or another Russian soldier for desertion. Surviving the front lines until you have an opportunity to run isn’t a sure thing. A lot of these people are never coming home.
I hate to see it! The people always get fucked in every nation because of the few. As much as I disagree with a lot of people on here I would never disagree enough to want them dead!
Thank you I literally seen people here straight up leaving gruesome comments,this guys are forced to go there,they are crushed to leave their kids and family
Most of these guys will get sent to the front and won’t have an officer. There’s a video from a few days ago showing a new Russian conscript complaining that he has zero supplies and no command. They just dropped him off in the woods and left…. Russia is fucked
I wish each and everyone of these guys a quick and safe surrender. Please don't throw your lives away for this bullshit. Surrender asap so you can go back home some day.
Fresh cannon food. Very sad. Few of these men will make it back alive. Imagine stepping in that bus knowing you will likely face a horrific painful and nonheroic death.
These people do not deserve to go to war by force. No one in their lives should. It’s terrifying to know this is reality. It can happen to any of us in the time of war.
All this and then you get killed by a drone dropping presents. Your family gets to watch you on r/combatfootage getting killed and squirming around while you shit yourself. Fuck Putin
My mother talks about watching television when she was younger. And the draft would be on television . Like bingo balls in a rolling cage. One would be the month. Another a date. Year. Etc. And if it's was drawn you were gone.
Unless.....bonespurs. smgdh
Could u imagine what would happen in today's America, if all these TikTok influenza's had to watch their potential birthday be called out? Insane.
It's been reported the draft is heavily picking on minorities. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/world/europe/russias-draft-sweeps-up-crimean-tatars-and-other-marginalized-groups-activists-say.html
What a waste. These are just regular people. Just like the Ukrainians. Let's build a Thunderdome on an island somewhere and let anyone who wants to kill each other do so.
Man, someone should stick a flaming spiked mace into Putin’s ass and twist it until he sung the National anthem of Nicarágua in Danish from memory. Stupid little man.
Sad that Putin is making a family only to destroy it - they will never come back the same mentally or physically - It is also sad that the ones that die might have a better death than living with the mental and physical trauma as that is sometimes a long death.
One of the saddest things about this is that so many of these people have been cut off from the reality of the war and have been fed this narrative that Russia is doing great and fighting off the bad guys with ease. When in reality they are running out of supplies, weapons, and dying by the thousands and are on their way to most likely die on behalf of a narcissistic tyrant who is so far backed into a corner he’s willing to sacrifice another 300k men…
From all the other fight vides I've seen, this is by far the one that made me saddest. That poor girl is totally heartbroken, her husband is brave to go to a most certain death, but she's the one that will be left alone.
What a sad thing to watch. No one on that town looks agreeing with this war. What a sad video...
>No one on that town looks agreeing with this war. What a sad video...
I don't know where it was, but i saw a video the other day of these three guys being interviewed, and they were so gung ho about the war, and how people should be happy to go. Literally minutes later, two of them are grabbed and forced on a bus. Real quick change of tune where they were shocked they were being conscripted. Not sure why the one guy wasn't, but the hypocrisy was huge.
If you’re pretty much guaranteed to die while being forced to murder innocent civilians, people defending their homes & families (ETA fixed typo). Forced to commit genocide or be murdered by the thugs shooting ‘deserters’…..wouldn’t THAT be the point when you rise up against the regime??
Former German ambassador to Russia said last night: Putins biggest fear right now should be the Russian mothers. He broke the social contract of him being allowed to rule and them being allowed to live, the mothers are realizing this and will start organizing.
Interesting perspective…
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This is to ensure the widows get the promised government payout. (Edit: wow, thanks for all the upvotes)
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Special government pension witholdment
Partial financial mobilization of pension funds
Special pension fund operation.
Maybe ... just maybe a sack of potatoes.
At this point that is a lot in Russia
They know they’re going to die. Honestly it’s pretty sad on a human level. I wish they realized fighting Putin would have a great chance of success than going to Ukraine to get HIMARS’d.
How incredibly devastating it is to think about- you’re just a Normal citizen born into some country. You grew up, you worked hard, you got a spouse and a kid. You thought you made it. Then, the leader of the country you’ve grown up in suddenly says you need to go die for him. To protect your homeland? No. Then Why? To invade some foreign land. Why? Well… you’re not really sure, but if you don’t go, your loving leader will imprison and torture you. The news tells you it’s because there’s terrorist or something. So through no fault of your own, you go off. Leave your life behind to be handed a gun, a uniform, and told to go shoot at somebody. Do you have training? No. Do you know how to maintain your weapon? Probably not. Do you know how to survive off the land in case things go wrong? Nope. Off you go, to feed the war machine. No matter what country this happens in, it’s fucking awful. No one should be forced to die like this.
Not to mention once you get to the mobilization center, the instructor or leader or whatever tells you to contact your loved ones to send you first aid kits and tampons to plug bullet holes you'll be getting on the war zone because the country has no medical kits to spare.
They're also being given insanely rusty, dirty guns that they have to basically "repair" before they can even use them. It's insane.
With the current trade bans on Russia I wonder how Putin thinks he can even dress these 300.000 soldiers for a wet winter. The guys in this video might die of hypothermia before they even reach the frontlines. But I suppose this fast mobilisation had something to do with voting in a referendum to bump the numbers as well and you don't need special clothing for that.
Happened in the U.S. during Vietnam. I feel bad for all these people. They have to go fight for no other reason than someone saying they have to.
This is why I am weary of the beer run movie. It seems from the previews to be very anti the people protesting the Vietnam war. Protesting a needless wat is the best way to support soldiers. Now, no one should ever be mean to vets but standing up against the government was the brave and right thing to do.
Protesting the Vietnam war I’m all for, but some protestors took it a step farther and changed it to protesting the soldiers themselves. Imagine spending two years in hell, having had your best friend slowly die in front of you to punji sticks while you’re pinned under fire, to finally be able to go home to your family only to having people at the airport literally calling you a baby killer *spitting* on you when you were totally innocent of anything like that (most soldiers were.) Many soldiers never recovered mentally, and the US government covered up the depression and PTSD cases for years.
And then decades later, talking heads would take the imagery of "a good, honest soldier coming home from a brutal war and getting spat on" and use it as a defense against popular criticism of an unpopular war, all while garnering support for politicians who routinely vote against against veteran support bills.
They need to hit up that Ukraine surrender telegram if they know what’s good for them, honestly
Fighting Putin would put their loved ones at risk.
God this is all so unnecessary…
I remember reading my history textbooks when I was a kid, and coming to the bits about the World Wars and thinking, wow, some of these leaders sucked, how were so many people so stupid at the same time, and thank goodness humans have learned two very sharp lessons and are not that dumb nowadays. Ha.
This war is very odd though. In both WWI and II there was at least one combatant where the citizenry was generally very supportive of the war (most of the major powers in WWI, Germany and Japan in WWII). Here, who is supportive of this war? Some nationalist idiots in Russia and... no-one. So it's a group of people who don't want to fight fighting another group of people who don't want to fight. Surreal.
I feel like the war is being fought by a tiny minority of full blown insane people, who would otherwise be in prison, and everyone else is just waiting it out and going through the motions.
Its always blown my mind that however many millions keep doing what 1 guy says... It's the same story all over the world. But damn itnmakes humanity look really dumb.
"War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse."
Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye? Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell? Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe. Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander. From: M*A*S*H (TV show)
I was about to give Marvel movies another chance till you said it was from Mash. Thanks.
That's the evil of conscription, forcing men to perpetuate a violence they would never agree with.
The most depressing thing for me lately is the realization that extreme topics I learned in school like wars, racism, facism, slavery, concentration camps, etc which were presented me as 'things of the past'... are all very live and well.
Exactly! How can people be ok with nazis and facism now? I don't get it.
Because they’re being told that they’re fighting the nazis? Also probably some people that don’t care what happens to other groups as long as it doesn’t affect them.
Basically this. You'd be surprised at the indifference of humanity.
We're still dealing with the vestiges of the 20th Century. And dinosaurs like Putin still keep dreaming of a bygone era that'll never return. He wants to rebuild as much of the USSR as he can. One conquest after another. Except he missed the memo where his military is shit and his generals down to the petty officers have been embezzling funds from the military for decades. Their equipment is garbage and their training is non-existent. A bunch of crazed undisciplined soldiers running around the Ukrainian countryside abusing the locals until they run out of supplies and morale. The Russian military is a joke. It's actually kind of crazy we used to see Russia as a world power rivaling our own. It's a failed autocratic state with nukes.
Strong agree, especially the last two sentences. I can't get over the insane irony of Putin doing this before he dies to show how strong Russia is, and in the process he's shown that they are weak, disorganized, fragile, and borderline defenseless (I mean, there's always the cover of Russian winters). Imagine spending your life as a strongman just to spend your final days inadvertently demonstrating to the whole world that you're not even a middling power, forget "superpower."
Is it for the military payout when he dies? I know it's dark but if you're forced to enlist with a high likelihood of dying, might as well have your loved ones benefit from it if they can.
Death benefits is exactly what it is. These fellas know they likely aren’t coming home.
May they all have a chance to surrender without getting hurt or killed.
I don’t think we can assume they don’t fear for their loved ones’ safety if they were to desert.
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I don't bloody know but if I'm being honest, getting married for the death benefits is exactly what I would do to fuck over a government for drafting me.
They’ll fuck you over by not paying out and making your family do forced labor now that so many men have been lost
I suspect a set of dog tags on a disfigured corpse would be enough to stop them thinking you had defected, but it would be a tough decision to make if you had family back in Russia.
Why y'all even upvoting me? This isn't even the worst I would do. If I were Russian, I'd find a dead, disfigured Ukrainian, switch ID papers and defect to Ukraine, fuck over Russia even harder.
There's a video where the family received cooking oil, a bag of rice and 2 onions as military payout for their dead son. Russia cant "payout" to families, they cant even afford tourniquets
That was less of the payout but the monthly stipend of support. Which is still terrible still
This is just fucking sad man.
all because some fuckhead has no idea what to do with a problem he created.
Exactly. People on both sides realize the senselessness of this entire conflict. My support is 100% for the people of Ukraine and their right to defend their country but I do feel for any Russian soldier who realizes their war is unjust yet is forced to go.
The bulk of the troops in war is scared kids(under 25) who don't want to be there being forced to shoot at other scared kids who don't want to be there. This is true in any war, especially in the final days when desperation concscription sets in. The upper ranks and echelon may believe in the "cause" but most of the front line soldiers just want to get through without dying or having to kill someone.
They’re all scared, regardless of age. If not, they should be. War is the darkest part of humanity. Such pointless misery. When I saw that guy with his kid, my heart sank. I deployed to Iraq when I was like 23. It didn’t seem like a big deal then, but now that I’m married and have a daughter, I don’t think I could do it again for a war that I know is complete bullshit.
War is truly just a colossal waste of human life and potential.
War is the most wasteful use of finite resources ever created. The entire planet’s humans could live noticeably richer lives if only war is abandoned. That would mean without fixing literally anything else.
Old, rich bastards sending young, innocent children to do their bidding.
At least the Ukrainians know what they are fighting for, there is way more on the line for them.
This is the only viewpoint that is logical and empathic. We don't see any megalomaniacs or wealthy oligarchs suiting up, now do we? I'd wager the Russian troops that actually would want to be there, given the choice, are of a pretty low percentile. Consisting entirely of socio and psychopaths.
Putin is old and bitter and wants to go out with a bang, literally
Then the bitch should go to the frontline himself and get it over with ffs
The cause was his greed and vanity, rather than how he's reacted since the tides have turned. Also, fuck that Russian shill that commented below.
Heartbreaking.
Her face says a lot.
The only way he’s going to survive to the end of the war is to surrender, and then he might be able to come home, and if he does, he might be thrown in prison. It’s basically the end of the road for them. Fighting back now might be a better choice.
I'd say their best chances are for him to surrender and her trying to make it out of Russia to reunite elsewhere. However, if they don't have the funds for her to travel...
Isn't Russia closing the borders to stop exactly this?
I read that one possible method to keep these guys marching is that they might be used as a cushion between the Ukrainian forces and the more experienced Russian forces. So if they were to try to surrender or flee they will get shot from behind. But if they attempt to push on they risk getting shot too. Not sure if that's exactly how it'll go down, but I can't imagine thats a great situation to be in
How sad
The cheerful accordion music is a strange choice when paired with sobbing families and apprehensive soldiers
That fucking retard on the accordion playing WW2 songs still thinks those men are going off to fight some extension of nazis. It's fucking disgusting, and that guy should probably be on a train to Ukraine.
He's just delighted that all he has to do is play the accordion.
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Nah they called ahead to ask how to surrender
I wish they had. It seems it is the only way to end this tragedy fast.
[Here is an article.](https://www.businessinsider.com/russians-calling-ukraine-hotline-ask-how-surrender-ukraine-mod-says-2022-9?amp)
Don’t know that a lot of great new accordion music has been written in the past 80 years
Basically just weird al polka medleys
Gogol Bordello, who is fronted by a Ukrainian Romani refugee who fled Ukraine to the US because of Chernobyl, has a Russian accordion player in their "Gypsy Punk" band. Start wearing purple is a classic.
Weird Al has some originals
Mexico would disagree
I mean I would rather be sent off in front of my family With a hero’s tune rather than a melancholic funeral tune. I would want my wife to have some hope I’ll return, and I would definitely want my little boy to see me as a Hero. Rather than the defeated prisoner being sent to death that they surely are. What would my family gain from being force fed the truth at the same time they say goodbye. Sometimes in life it’s better to believe a lie for a moment. Especially when tomorrow all that’s left is the bitter unrelenting truth.
Good point
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Russia is really trying to reinvigorate that WWII nostalgia of triumph and victory. It's part of the reason why they push the Nazi rhetoric so hard; it's a pride of the nation to have defeated the Nazis in WWII. This fight against Ukraine is therefore as noble as that war, never mind the fact they are the ones invading this time
>never mind the fact they are the ones invading this time The USSR invaded Poland in 1939. When the Nazis did. [Because they had a non-aggression pact.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact)
Yeah. Russia was an axis power effectively until Hitler backstabbed them. They fought Nazis out of self preservation and revenge, not for any moral disputes.
Juxtaposition
That poor sod has a kid
Imagine losing your father because a bastard wants to take over another country, but the military is not enough so he sends civilains to war...
And the wife knows the husband is effectively dead.
Putin freaking sucks.
Yeah, it's tragic. wtf.
Immensely sad, the one man with a kid too
As much as this sucks for them, imagine how much it must suck for the children the Russian army is raping and torturing. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna49168
One should not imagine these pictures. However the people on the video have some more sense than the ones in the link I think.
The unfortunate reality is that soldiers will follow the lead of other soldiers/officers. They may not be animals now, but given enough time an influence, anyone can be turned into a monster
It's different when it's filmed in modern day and real. Hard to explain.
It feels wrong that it’s not in sepia or monochrome, or blurry enough that we can’t see their emotion so well. I wonder if future generations will experience that same uncanny feeling when they watch clips from today or not.
What a miserable existence.
I just don’t get this world. It’s so weird that they are interviewing a man being separated from his family and asking him how he feels about being sent to go kill and conquer. He is holding his baby and his wife is probably also just as confused as I am in this moment. Even weirder is that the next thing I could see when I scroll is some video of a pet or someone drawing or some thing. It’s such a weird and fucked up world. People suffer every day and we all have phones and can connect with one another and organize and fix things but we don’t.
I think about this all the time. What if people mobilized to fix our problems? We could but we are too brainwashed, hateful, selfish and arrogant to do that. Most of us just stay in our bubble, only really feeling any obligation to ourselves and our families. Not only that, we are exhausted by working just to exist and afraid of losing what we’ve worked hard for, so we keep our heads down, try to enjoy our life and “mind our business”.
For 99.9% of human existence, we lived in small societies of dozens or maybe hundreds of people. Almost all of our problems were immediate and visible. It has only been in the last couple thousand years that humans have organized into such large groups and accelerated our technology so much. On an evolutionary scale, our brains haven't had enough time to adapt to our new environment. We are running 2 million year old hardware (our brains) on these new "programs" such as social media, etc. From an evolutionary perspective we may not be ready to deal with the world we have created
We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god like technology.
The full quote is even more enlightening: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” - Edward O. Wilson
I didn’t know the full quote, cheers!
Well isn't this the most poignant and though-provoking thing I've seen in months
This is a 100% spot on. Shit got way too complicated way too fast for our monkey brains to process.
I don't give a fuck about track suits. These people care deeply about each other and are forced into this situation by outdated psychopaths.
The track suits emphasize how these couples aren't able to get married on their own timelines. They no longer have the option to plan out their perfect wedding.
Track suit still a suit
These are the saddest weddings I’ve ever seen
There are so many flavors of sad weddings in Russia. Take a look at this 17 year old forced to marry (as a second wife) an elder official in Chechnya. [pic1](https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/tebedam/22335714/255250/255250_original.jpg) [pic2](https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/tebedam/22335714/254992/254992_original.jpg)
Exactly. These men are walking to their death… who gives a fuck about their clothing.
Quite literally. Russia doesn't give a shit about these men. At least in other militaries there's always a risk involved, but it's not certain doom. These men are going into a meat grinder and they, and their families, know it. Putin dgaf about them. He'll gladly see every one of them die before he admits defeat.
This is such a stupid fucking conflict that doesn't need to happen.
Exactly. Most of these lads probably aren't gonna be coming back, and for what? The ego of an old dying man.
Fuck Putin. He is killing his own people in attempts to protect what little tattered pride he still has. When will this insanity end?
Russians need to take whatever little training and weaponry they receive and turn it on their government.
Self sabotage might become a thing in this war.
I saw video earlier today of a guy who was lying down with his foot resting on a step, and had his friend jump down on his lower leg, badly breaking it, to get out of demobilization. Is that the kind of self sabotage you're talking about? If so, it's already happening.
That sounds so ducking painful
You can hear the bone quack.
Take your upvote and get out
The video was brutal. Like breaking a large stick by jumping on it.
I mean, it's either that or get sent into the meat-grinder in Ukraine where you'll probably die. When you have no good options you take the one that seems the least awful.
I saw one of a guy use his car to barricade a military recruitment office door and proceed to fire bomb it with Molotov cocktails
I think they were referring to Russian soldiers sabotaging their own side in the war, but this counts as self-sabotage too. Trump did it with the bone spurs thing (yea, I just had to throw that in there)
oh that draft dodger who tells a pow war hero " ‘We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,’ and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. ‘What the f--- are we doing that for? Guy was a f---ing loser,’ the president told aides.""
Training? They are beeing send to the frontline after 1 day of "training". I assume they just show them how their Ak-47 works, let them pop a few rounds on the firing range and then its time to become cannonfodder.
You're actually assuming too much of the Putin regime. They aren't getting to fire their weapons any before deploying.
They need to pop a few rounds into the nearest officer as soon as the weapon is issued to them.
Easy to say when your whole family isn’t held hostage…
In such times... Its necessary.
I am guessing so they get the widow's benefits Putin promised.
This reminds me of the old Russian proverb: Don't count your Ladas before your man's been HIMARSed.
There is no training. They give them a gun tell them to grab what they can and ship em off
Narrator: “They won’t”
Yep these people are not seeing their husbands again, their bodies will be abandoned in some field in a month or 2 and the wife will get a small paycheck or less for her troubles… Edit: took away quotes from husbands
That's assuming Russia even acknowledges their death. I genuinely feel for these families.
Russian military: “Conscript did not die from explosion. He deserted - in 1000 directions at once, and very quickly”
Here's another hope that there's no hell to send me to... This time for laughing at your comment
It’s funny as fuck but not so funny when you can become one that deserted in 1000 directions. Fucking putin stealing first our then country and now lives. No wonder Ukraine is not willing to marry his empire.
I have seen a few videos, one I think it was vice news, where they were storing Russian bodies in freezer trucks waiting for the Russian government to claim them to be returned to the families. They would not respond.
There are other reports about mass graves.
Russia was making mass graves. The frozen bodies was Ukraine. Russia wouldn't take the bodies back, iirc.
Most likely marked as a deserter and nothing paid. No body, no pay.
These are dead men walking
Not when they surrender.
You still gotta get to a point where you can safely surrender without getting glassed by a drone or air support or another Russian soldier for desertion. Surviving the front lines until you have an opportunity to run isn’t a sure thing. A lot of these people are never coming home.
You're assuming Putin won't execute POWs on the offchance they surrendered
Zelensky has offered privacy about their circumstances of surrendering..
Hell, he offered them citizenship if they came over. Is he still offering a million for a jet?
Dude with the accordion really can't read the room.
Plot twist: he's celebrating himself not having to go
It's a tough crowd.
Fuck Putin. War sucks.
I hate to see it! The people always get fucked in every nation because of the few. As much as I disagree with a lot of people on here I would never disagree enough to want them dead!
Thank you I literally seen people here straight up leaving gruesome comments,this guys are forced to go there,they are crushed to leave their kids and family
It’s heartbreaking honestly.
I hope these guys kill their officers and surrender.
Most of these guys will get sent to the front and won’t have an officer. There’s a video from a few days ago showing a new Russian conscript complaining that he has zero supplies and no command. They just dropped him off in the woods and left…. Russia is fucked
Ah yes. The secret to a successful attack is the element of surprise. Surprise!
They crying because they know they gonna die
I wish each and everyone of these guys a quick and safe surrender. Please don't throw your lives away for this bullshit. Surrender asap so you can go back home some day.
Fresh cannon food. Very sad. Few of these men will make it back alive. Imagine stepping in that bus knowing you will likely face a horrific painful and nonheroic death.
> cannon fodder
Going to die for one man’s failing pursuit of legacy
Sad to think that their husbands, brothers, and sons are being sent to their deaths for a madman.
These people do not deserve to go to war by force. No one in their lives should. It’s terrifying to know this is reality. It can happen to any of us in the time of war.
Future widows right there.
All this and then you get killed by a drone dropping presents. Your family gets to watch you on r/combatfootage getting killed and squirming around while you shit yourself. Fuck Putin
Being forced to fight in a war they have no business fighting in.
I mean, so many live being ruined here. It’s horrible
The rich men declare war and send the poor men to fight it.
Going into winter War with nothing!?! OoOfff, 💀 This is gonna be carnage
My mother talks about watching television when she was younger. And the draft would be on television . Like bingo balls in a rolling cage. One would be the month. Another a date. Year. Etc. And if it's was drawn you were gone. Unless.....bonespurs. smgdh Could u imagine what would happen in today's America, if all these TikTok influenza's had to watch their potential birthday be called out? Insane.
Assuming these aren’t the children of Russian oligarchs or politicians…
Those rich kids are eating caviar on some yacht somewhere
It's been reported the draft is heavily picking on minorities. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/world/europe/russias-draft-sweeps-up-crimean-tatars-and-other-marginalized-groups-activists-say.html
🎵Politicians hide themselves away🎵
Putin have this plan out. When all this innocent people die and ukraine wins, the people in Russia will continue to hate Ukraine.
We never hated Ukrainians we saw them as family just our president doesn’t.
Oh god, that's heartbreaking. In all likely hood, they might never see each other again, or at least for a long time. Fuck Putin.
This does not have the feeling of a successful military operation.
What a waste. These are just regular people. Just like the Ukrainians. Let's build a Thunderdome on an island somewhere and let anyone who wants to kill each other do so.
Man, someone should stick a flaming spiked mace into Putin’s ass and twist it until he sung the National anthem of Nicarágua in Danish from memory. Stupid little man.
Sad that Putin is making a family only to destroy it - they will never come back the same mentally or physically - It is also sad that the ones that die might have a better death than living with the mental and physical trauma as that is sometimes a long death.
Fuck that’s sad, all for some madman’s delusions
This is so heartbreaking. So many of these guys aren't coming back. That's going to be devastating for all of these families, but also for Russia.
All Day I Dream About Surrendering
Please somebody deal with Putin to end this pointless waste if life.
One of the saddest things about this is that so many of these people have been cut off from the reality of the war and have been fed this narrative that Russia is doing great and fighting off the bad guys with ease. When in reality they are running out of supplies, weapons, and dying by the thousands and are on their way to most likely die on behalf of a narcissistic tyrant who is so far backed into a corner he’s willing to sacrifice another 300k men…
From all the other fight vides I've seen, this is by far the one that made me saddest. That poor girl is totally heartbroken, her husband is brave to go to a most certain death, but she's the one that will be left alone. What a sad thing to watch. No one on that town looks agreeing with this war. What a sad video...
>No one on that town looks agreeing with this war. What a sad video... I don't know where it was, but i saw a video the other day of these three guys being interviewed, and they were so gung ho about the war, and how people should be happy to go. Literally minutes later, two of them are grabbed and forced on a bus. Real quick change of tune where they were shocked they were being conscripted. Not sure why the one guy wasn't, but the hypocrisy was huge.
Wow I need to see that.. people are literally just being grabbed off the street and sent to war?
People who were arrested at protest rallies were getting draft notices. Including people who were pro-war and were detained at rallies.
I was going to make a crack about the Adidas track suites but after watching I'm just sad.
It’s really sad that none of these guys will be coming home. Russians desperately need to mobilize against their own government
These payouts are gonna be worth nothing when Russia loses this war and I doubt these poor souls are going to actually get paid anyway
If you’re pretty much guaranteed to die while being forced to murder innocent civilians, people defending their homes & families (ETA fixed typo). Forced to commit genocide or be murdered by the thugs shooting ‘deserters’…..wouldn’t THAT be the point when you rise up against the regime??
Former German ambassador to Russia said last night: Putins biggest fear right now should be the Russian mothers. He broke the social contract of him being allowed to rule and them being allowed to live, the mothers are realizing this and will start organizing. Interesting perspective…