#meat waves

[tomorrowusa]

‘I didn’t know how to shoot’: how African men have been tricked into fighting for Russia

Exclusive: Lured by false job adverts, they are unknowingly enlisted on arrival and put in mortal danger

Africans are still being lured to Russia and then being tricked into becoming cannon fodder in the Russian Army.

Russia's casualty rate is astronomical as Russian commanders, under pressure by Putin, use "meat wave" attacks to capture tiny amounts of territory in Ukraine. So Russia tries to lure recruits from the developing world with false promises of "jobs".

Stephen Oduor was looking forward to starting his new job as a plumber in Russia to support his family after months of unemployment. But soon after landing in St Petersburg from Nairobi with six other Kenyans one afternoon last August, he started feeling something was off. The man who received them at the airport drove them to a house where their luggage was taken away and they were given black clothes and shoes to wear. Afterwards, they were taken to a police station where they were fingerprinted and forced to sign documents written in Russian, a language they did not understand. When they were taken the next day to a large military facility in the city for processing of military IDs, it began to dawn on the 24-year-old that he had unknowingly enlisted in the Russian armed forces.

The "recruits" get little training and may not even know how to fire a gun.

After getting their IDs, the Kenyans were put on a train and travelled for two days to the city of Belgorod in south-western Russia near the border with Ukraine. At a military camp in the city, they were handed military uniforms, assault rifles and other weapons in order to go straight to the battlefield without training. “I didn’t know how to shoot anything,” Oduor recalled.

Putin's army is racist and views Africans as cheap and expendable.

Kenya’s ministry of foreign and diaspora affairs said more than 200 of its nationals may be in Ukraine, having been tricked by recruitment networks that post fake job adverts online. Footage recently posted to social media gives an apparent glimpse of the conditions facing Africans in Ukraine and their racist mistreatment by Russian soldiers. One purports to show a black man with an anti-tank mine strapped to his chest, being ordered at gunpoint in what appears to be a trench to move to Ukrainian positions. A Russian speaker calls him a “piece of coal” and says he’s going to be the “opener today”, implying that he will be made to detonate the mine in order to “open” a Ukrainian bunker. The man reluctantly lurches ahead. “No, no, no,” he says as the Russian speaker prods him with the tip of his gun. Another purportedly shows armed black men in military attire singing a Ugandan revolutionary song in the snow in the woods, while a Russian speaker in the background laughs and describes them as “disposables”.

It's likely that a trip to Russia for most Africans is one-way.

Most Kenyans who end up in Ukraine have not managed to return home.

Susan Kuloba hasn’t seen her eldest child, David, since he left Kenya for Russia in August. Kenyan employment agents told him he would get a job as a security guard but in fact he was conscripted into the Russian military. The 22-year-old, who used to work as a construction worker in Nairobi, kept his mother constantly updated on WhatsApp, sending her messages, photos and videos of his time in Russia. On 30 September, a day before his second mission to fight Ukrainians, he sent her a copy of his military contract and a disturbing voice message suggesting he may not survive the mission. “In case of anything, you’ll get a call to inform you whether I’ll have died or I’ll be alive. If I’ll have died, take the documents to [the Kenyan] Immigration or to the [Russian] embassy. If you take them to the embassy, tell them I’m your child. When you do that, they’ll give you a pay cheque … I love you all very much.” They chatted for three more days, then he went quiet. After a week, a friend of David’s who had gone to Russia but escaped told Susan that he learned from a WhatsApp group for Kenyan fighters that her son had been killed.

The Russian Army does not even bother to inform the next of kin in Africa that their relative was killed in some futile military operation.

The unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine has become genocidal in more than one way. Russia views Africans as cheap and "disposable".

In the end, this is yet another indication that Russia is desperate and must engage in human trafficking to keep from losing the war.

[tomorrowusa]

Putin forced to send wounded back to fight and offer huge military salaries as Russia suffers a million casualties

Russia has made advances into eastern Ukraine, but the human cost is an estimated 53 casualties per square kilometre seized.

On the 1204th (or is it the 1205th?) day of Putin's "3-day special operation", Russian losses have exceeded 1,000,000.

Russian military losses in Ukraine exceed one million since full-scale invasion

The total combat losses of Russian troops from February 24, 2022, to June 12, 2025, in the war against Ukraine amount to approximately 1 million 340 people, of which 1,140 were lost in the past 24 hours.

From the main article linked on top...

The scale of losses since the full-scale invasion in 2022 is a direct result of Russia’s “meat grinder” approach to fighting, which relies on sending waves of troops into enemy fire, sacrificing many so that a few can get through. Vladimir Putin’s strategy has allowed Russian forces to make steady – but painfully slow – advances into eastern Ukraine, but at an estimated cost of 53 casualties per square kilometre seized. [ ... ] One response is to return wounded soldiers to combat duty before they have fully recovered. Some Russian soldiers have reportedly complained that they are being forced to return to the front before their medical treatments are finished. CNN reported that Ukrainian drone operators have released video footage appearing to show Russian soldiers on crutches in combat zones. Military recruiters also visit Russia’s prisons with the offer of full pardons for those who survive a combat tour. Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service says Russia’s ministry of defence has recruited an estimated 180,000 soldiers using this method, which was introduced by Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in the summer of 2022. [ ... ] This influx of money has transformed the lives of people living in some of Russia’s most economically deprived regions. This increased prosperity has bolstered support for Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. But the departure – and, in many cases, permanent loss – of so many men has shifted the demographics of many small communities, which are now populated largely by women, young children and the elderly. [ ... ] Although Russia has a large population, its human resources are not endless and have been under strain even before its mass invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, bringing enormous combat losses and seemingly endless demands for more and more soldiers. Russia was already experiencing a demographic crisis. The proportion of society of child-bearing age is low, reflecting a dip in the birth rate in the 1990s. The COVID pandemic increased the mortality rate among Russia’s adult population, while hundreds of thousands of young men left Russia in 2022 to avoid military service. A long-term legacy of this war will undoubtedly be a shrinking population, despite the state’s efforts to encourage women to have more babies. Even those Russian women who aspire to earn the newly reinstated “Mother Heroine” award by bearing and raising ten or more children may struggle to find men to father them.

So Putin has been using convicts, North Korean mercenaries, and already wounded soldiers to fight his illegal and pointless war.

George Barros of the US Institute for the Study of War spoke with the Kyiv Independent. Much of the conversation centered on Russia's vulnerable economy.

Here's an article on Russia's war exhaustion.

‘War Exhaustion’ Could Mean Russia Is Defeated in Ukraine

And here's the latest daily information update on Russian losses compiled by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It's the first release to show Russia over the 1,000,000 mark.

^^^ I wonder if the number of tanks (10,933) includes the ones captured by Ukrainian farmers early in the war when Russians were retreating.

To me, it looks like Russia is the one running out of cards. Share this with people who think Russia is winning or those who are unaware of Russia's massive losses.

[tomorrowusa]

Russia's Funeral Industry Booms Amid Rising Deaths From Ukraine War

As Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its fourth summer, the country’s booming funeral industry offers a stark indicator of the conflict’s h

Putin has not been great for Russia's economy – except the funeral business.

As Moscow's invasion of Ukraine heads into its fourth summer, Russia’s funeral industry is experiencing a sharp and telling boom. While official combat death statistics are hidden from public view, some Russians have taken to social media to highlight the skyrocketing cost of burial services in a funeral market that is growing fast. According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, the funeral services market in Russia grew by 12.7 percent in the first four months of 2025 compared to the same period the previous year. Nearly 200 new funeral-related businesses opened in that period with the fastest growth reported in Tatarstan, the Moscow region, and St. Petersburg.

One downside to this business is funeral inflation.

The price of grave digging, coffin construction, and headstones have all soared. The cost of a coffin in April increased by 9 percent to roughly $100, and grave digging was up 15 percent to about$150,according to the Russian government statistical office, Rosstat.

The stats come from official sources in the Russian government – not from the decadent West.

The Russian government is trying to lure kids just out of high school to sign up for suicidal combat duty.

School-leavers losing their lives for Russia in Putin's war with Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has repeatedly promised that no 18-year-olds called up to serve Russia will be sent to fight in Ukraine, but a BBC Russian investigation has found at least 245 soldiers of that age have been killed there in the past two years. New government rules mean teenagers fresh out of school have been able to bypass military service and go straight into the regular army as contract soldiers. They may make up only a fraction of Russian losses, but cash bonuses and patriotic propaganda have made signing up an attractive choice. Alexander Petlinsky enlisted two weeks after his 18th birthday. He was killed in Ukraine just 20 days later: one of hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed in Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine which has also claimed the lives of at least 13,500 Ukrainian civilians since Putin launched the invasion in February 2022.

Alex died so that Putin could claim he was a 21st century version of Peter the Great. His death did Russia absolutely no good.

Russian governments going back to the tsarist monarchy have encouraged Russians to think that sacrificing themselves for the government is a natural and even expected thing. Putin takes advantage of this mindset. What little territory Putin has gained has been as a result of what has been called "kamikaze tactics".

‘That idiot Putin wants to take it all’: Russia’s kamikaze tactics fuel a slow advance in Ukraine

Alex Budilov, a (Ukrainian) combat officer with the brigade, said the Russians exaggerated their battlefield gains for propaganda purposes, in order to spread fear and panic among the local population. They had sustained colossal losses in manpower to achieve the “fleeting appearance of success”, he suggested. “A couple of dickhead Russian soldiers raise a flag next to a village. Minutes later we wipe them out,” he said. Speaking in a rear forest camp, Budilov called Moscow’s assault tactics “insidious” and said it involved sacrificing hundreds of soldiers to achieve success. First, it sends in a heavily protected tank, nicknamed “the barn”, which is covered in bulky metal cages to repel Ukrainian drones. Other military vehicles accompany it. They include tanks, armoured personnel carriers and trucks loaded with assault troops. [ ... ] According to western estimates, Russia has suffered more than one million casualties, killed and wounded – a toll far higher than Soviet losses from the war in Afghanistan. “It’s a very Russian idea that you are a small part of something bigger. You sacrifice your life to do something for history. It’s a totalitarian mind virus,” Budilov suggested, arguing that Russians and Ukrainians were “very different”.

Putin and his commanders place little value on human life. Nobody has killed hundreds of thousands of Russians like this since the time of Hitler and Stalin.

Any Russian males of military age still in Russia need to quickly take this advice from a popular US film from the previous decade.

[tomorrowusa]

« I would like to draw your attention to one specific trait of the Russian or Soviet empire: the extremely low value of human life. This is not just an internal problem. In international relations, a low value of life is an indispensable currency of aggression, a natural resource of sorts, the raw material of war. For an aggressor it can "buy" what nothing else can buy: time.

For decades, Operation Desert Storm, which took place in 1991, epitomized the revolution in modern warfare. Western armies have invested heavily in keeping their personnel out of harm's way.

Putin's army, however, is the army of yesterday. And exactly this is its gruesome advantage. It can sustain losses that would be absolutely unacceptable for any Western country. But it is also technically advanced enough to counter Western military technologies.

Western science was first to "dronize" warfare, to minimize the involvement of troops on the ground and use machines for new tasks.

Putin's army, while also using real drones, “dronizes” the human beings as well. It has turned soldiers into dispensable, single-use units. »

— Exiled Russian author Sergey Lebedev. It is from a speech he gave at The Helsinki Debate on Europe in mid May and adapted as an article at Voxeurop.

Mr. Lebedev focused on Russia's occupation of Eastern Europe after World War II as its greatest crime and the war in Ukraine as a continuation of that crime. The way Russia regards its troops has made such criminality possible.

Even before Communism, Russian leaders regarded their troops as expendable. They have had little regard for the lives of their subjects for centuries. This has continued through the war in Ukraine where Russian officers order their troops to do "meat wave" suicidal attacks which seldom accomplish anything.

The culture of violence pervades Russia's military. That leads to low morale which results in counterproductive poor performance by troops. If your own officers turn their guns on you in battle, why should you bother putting in any extra effort?

Why Don’t Russian Soldiers Revolt?

If badly treated Russian soldiers started shooting abusive and incompetent commanders, the war in Ukraine would end in weeks.