Strategic sedatives for the mutant army

Drunk commanders expending sick soldiers. The 2023 stillbirth.

Today we’ll be taking a tour through the Ukrainian army. Luckily for our health, a virtual one, relying on reports from Ukraine’s brave warriors for European Civilization.

First, testimony from a man held in the dungeons of the Vinnytsia manpower distribution center. Commanders drill hidden phones to the wall, mobilized men cough up blood amidst the damp and mold, showers are only allowed twice a week at best, the healthy get sick, and escapees are beaten to a bloody pulp:

They bring in everyone here without distinction — chronic alcoholics who can’t stop shaking, drug addicts with burnt veins, skinny and toothless people. They even bring in homeless men in terrible condition — covered in sores, eczema, and all kinds of chronic illnesses. Everyone’s psychological state is horrible

Meanwhile, even nationalist militarists have been complaining about the mobilization of one of the country’s premier medical engineers, responsible for producing equipment that saves lives at the frontlines:

I asked Pavlo:
— “But you have eyesight problems!” (he wears glasses).
— “They don’t give a shit, they said I’m fit to serve…” — he replied.

Next, the future. Why complacency in the western media about the ‘100 year Russian offensive’

covers an ‘operational clusterfuck’ with a ‘strategic sedative.’

Meanwhile, how all this translates into the frontline. First, the situation in the south. Amidst Russian advances, the commander of a battalion from the 142nd brigade sent to save the situation is an

incompetent rogue and, according to some reports, arrives at the command post EXCLUSIVELY while intoxicated.

Besides his drunkenness, the commander’s proclivity towards lies has already led to ‘frightening… considerable losses’. This is apparently all in due course for the 142nd brigade, whose only purpose is to supply expendable infantry for other worn-out units:

It’s worth adding that these commanders had previously effectively annihilated the brigade on the Pokrovsk axis. In some companies fewer than ten people remained.

Meanwhile, recent proclamations by high command that the corps reform has been completed are ridiculed by military bloggers. In fact, the old practice of ruthlessly burning through the infantry of units ‘relocated’ from elsewhere continues. Our correspondents explain how this practice has meaninglessly expended lives on the Pavlohrad axis, where command has:

decided to fight an old problem with old methods that, as it turned out, only make the problems grow exponentially.

Finally, a more theoretical post I translated today begins with the premise that:

As of 2025, the Ukrainian military is a bizarre mutant in which the most talented and the most inept people coexist side by side. The brigades, battalions, staffs, tables, and positions are identical — but some cosplay the U.S. Army during the “Desert Storm,” while others resemble Iraqis.

Besides explaining the heterogenous tendencies existing in the army today, the text also explores the past.

It argues that the only high-quality sections of the Ukrainian army destroyed themselves in the steppes of Kherson in 2023. That is, even before the failed counteroffensive of that year, which was simply ‘the nail in the coffin’. Since then, the army has become a Gogolesque phantom:

Our “classical” army has become an army on paper — an army of stillborn brigades, untrained personnel, and incompetent staffs. In this army people worry more about overpayments of additional pay and nonwritten-off equipment than about losing personnel.

On paper you have a combat-ready battalion — respectable (not) members (fuck) of the commission signed off — but in reality there are 300 mobilized men: 150 of whom are fucked in the head, an incompetent commander, dreadful training, no commanders at most levels or NCOs, and a lack of supplies needed for modern war. On paper you have 100 trained soldiers, but in reality they literally know nothing, and every brigade asks that people be sent to complete basic combat training immediately within the units.

The future

The Economist put out an article on October 17, triumphantly proclaiming that Russia would have to keep fighting for 103 years to take all of Ukraine.