In audio intercepts from the front lines in Ukraine, Russian soldiers speak in shorthand of 200s to mean dead, 300s to mean wounded. The urge to flee has become common enough that they also talk of 500s — people who refuse to fight.
As the war grinds into its second winter, a growing number of Russian soldiers want out, as suggested in secret recordings obtained by The Associated Press of Russian soldiers calling home from the battlefields of the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine.
The calls offer a rare glimpse of the war as it looked through Russian eyes — a point of view that seldom makes its way into Western media, largely because Russia has made it a crime to speak honestly about the conflict in Ukraine. They also show clearly how the war has progressed, from the professional soldiers who initially powered Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion to men from all walks of life compelled to serve in grueling conditions.
“There’s no f------ ‘dying the death of the brave’ here,” one soldier told his brother from the front in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. “You just die like a f------ earthworm.”
Remember that a lot of them have PTSD, and they get support from people who went through many of the same things.
They should get real support that helps them move on from their old job, rather than reinforcing an identity that is harming them
Perhaps we could form some kind of club that would create the basis of that support.
That again just reinforces the nonsensical “veteran mindset”
Being in the military is a job. I supporting taking care of veterans the way I support paying teachers vastly more.
It isn’t an identity. It’s just a thing a person did, for compensation, years ago.
Unfathomably naive. Of all “jobs” done for “compensation” the military is the only one where you can be forced against your will to kill or be killed. To watch people die by your hand, to watch your friends die. To watch Innocents die. For some types of trauma not restricted to the military alone, there is no “getting over it”. It lives with you the rest of your life
A thing that only certain people do, and no one outside that small number of people actually realize what it was like and what life is like after. So having a “club” where you can go and hang out with people who actually understand what life was/is like after doing what you did, isn’t a bad thing.
I’ll repeat what another member said above: