Nearly five months into Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” and after countless reports of troops resorting to desperate measures to end the war, Russia’s defense ministry on Thursday suddenly announced it was giving some soldiers a “rest” in Ukraine Donbass.
The alleged disruption was announced by a ministry spokesman to Russian journalists early Thursday, according to the TASS news agency. It was framed as a compassionate gesture designed to ensure the well-being of troops, with a spokesman quoted as saying the time would be used to “replenish combat capability” and allow troops to “receive letters and packages from home”.
The announcement came after the Institute for the Study of War noted that for the first time in the full-scale invasion, Russia boasted no new territorial gains, a fact that experts said appeared to indicate they had “largely launched Operation Pause.”
But a separate briefing by Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov on Thursday made no mention of such a break, and it was unclear how many soldiers were supposedly allowed to take a break. Nor was it clear exactly what a “chance to rest” would entail.
Instead, the remarks seemed more in line with the Kremlin’s recent PR efforts to boost morale amid reports of dead soldiers being literally burned to hide losses and soldiers sent to the front line without equipment. The pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda did its best to present the announcement as cause for celebration among the soldiers, reporting that concerts were even organized for them.
The reality was very different on the ground in Ukraine, where local authorities in Kramatorsk said Russian forces launched a missile strike early Thursday in the city center that caused casualties. It is not yet clear how many people were injured or killed.
The supposed “operational pause” touted by Russian military officials also comes amid reports of Putin’s troops taking increasingly drastic measures to hide losses and shore up depleted resources.
In Kherson, where an official from Russia’s Federal Security Service recently took over as head of the “new” Kremlin-run administration, authorities have begun burning the bodies of dead soldiers “to hide the real number of casualties,” according to Ukrainian intelligence.
“On the outskirts of the city, objects with a large number of burnt human remains have been repeatedly spotted,” the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine said in a statement, noting that local authorities were trying to present the fires as if they were caused by from artillery strikes.
In addition, Russia is apparently becoming increasingly desperate to find fresh cannon fodder for the war — to the point that the military has begun looking to public employment agencies designed to help the unemployed, according to a new report.
The independent investigative publication IStories reported on Thursday that several Russian brigades that have suffered the worst losses in Ukraine – including the one accused of carrying out genocide in Bucha – used job portals to target desperate people with lost job luck, and in some cases sends them straight to the front line without any training.
According to Ukrainian intelligence, Russian soldiers caught on wiretapped phone conversations with relatives back home also routinely talked about being left out to dry by the military.
In one particularly disturbing call shared by Ukraine’s Security Service this week, a man identified as a Russian soldier can be heard breaking down as he tells a family member: “Do you know how many corpses I’ve seen that you’ve never seen you have never seen in your life: without heads, without legs, without torsos…”
“I’ll never recover from this… There’s only meat here… You can’t imagine what’s going on here. I don’t see how I can go back to normal life.”
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