The media and the bloodbath

Western responsibility for the assault units

The guilty are rarely punished. Especially if they’re journalists. People forget about the crimes, if they ever cared or knew, and those running PR for mass murder get a promotion.

But nevertheless, it’s worth pausing to take stock of the blood on certain people’s hands.

Over the past year, a certain branch of Ukraine’s army has ballooned in size. The assault forces, which now count around 50,000 troops. Just one assault regiment, the 425th, apparently controls 10-15% of the frontline, and more importantly, the most dangerous areas.

The units have become infamous for a number of things. These include systematic beating and torture of subordinates in the interests of general discipline and punishment for attempted escape. Beatings that regularly result in the death of troops, and include all sorts of medieval tortures. These include the execution of troops attempting to desert their battlefield positions, shot or hit by their own drones. ‘There are no such thing as ‘our own’’, a now-famous phrase used by the commander of one of the most prominent assault units, officially awarded Hero of Ukraine.

And all this in the interests of one thing — constant counterattacks against a much stronger enemy. When your mobilized civilian troops need to be thrown into an operation that will probably kill them, how else to motivate them? The coveted goal is to recover a settlement, whose name can then be broadcast in the press.

This glorious goal has quite concrete costs. According to one prominent Ukrainian military commander, officers in the 225th assault regiment boasted that they lost 1,000 of their own men in a week. Though this seems like a fantastical number, it might even be possible, given how large this ‘regiment’ is (around 10,000 troops), and the massive privilege in recruitment it has been given over the past year. Whether it is sustainable for the Ukrainain army, given its well-known recruitment issues, has an obvious answer.

These recruitment privileges of the assault units may be coming to an end. But those men aren’t coming back to life. So it’s worth reflecting on why exactly all that waste of human life occurred. It also gives an indication of whether this industrial slaughter will continue.

Militarily speaking, there are certain questions that arise about the assault units. On the one hand, there are certainly real reasons why the assault units exist. Given the lack of manpower, there need to be rapid response teams that fly around the front putting down enemy advances. And it is quite fanciful, as some critics like to say, that the army should operate solely with drones, that infantry assaults are a thing of the past. Drones can kill enemy troops, but they can’t hold territory. And even when staying on the defensive, some sorts of counterattacks are necessary to prevent outflanking manoeuvres, and more generally to prevent the enemy army from creeping forward.

But it is crucial to emphasize the event that caused the creation, or at least the massive expansion of the assault units. This was Ukraine’s late 2024 invasion of Russia’s Kursk oblast. It was because of the loyalty the assault units demonstrated in this adventure that commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky constantly expanded them.

A number of respected commanders in other Ukrainian military units refused to participate in this affair, which would quite obviously end in the catastrophe that unfolded a few months later. But the commanders of the assault units were happy to participate, and were at the avant-garde of the invasion. They stayed long after it should have been obvious that retreat was necessary. When it became unavoidable, in the spring of 2025, the retreat was chaotic and will even more casualties. And even after that, the assault units conducted a number of quite pointless attempts at incursion into Russia’s Belgorod oblast. According to another Ukrainian commander forced to fight alongside the assault units at this time, they regularly lost 90% of their main in pointless offensive operations.

The Kursk operation had no military value. Zelensky half-heartedly tried to claim that it aimed at ‘exchanging’ parts of the Kursk oblast with Ukrainian territory controlled by Russia. Russia refused. It was obvious to anyone with a brain cell that a) the Kursk oblast is, to put it mildly, not the most strategically important part of the Russian Federation, and b) attempts to blackmail the Russian government by taking territories hostage have never resulted in meek cooperation from Moscow.

And during late 2024 and 2025, the period during and after Kursk, Ukraine lost more territory than any time since 2022. 2025 saw even more lost. Elite units were gobbled up by Kursk, troops sorely needed by Ukraine’s own battlefield. Any hopes that Russia would relocate troops from the Donbass to Kursk didn’t materialize, at least in any materially noticeable way.

So what was the aim? To titillate the western imagination. To give the western media something to get excited about again. There was a domestic morale element, no doubt, but it was western audiences that really mattered. That’s where the money comes from to sustain Ukraine’s budget and army, after all.

At the time of Kursk, western audiences were rather bored, even disappointed with their once-exciting Ukrainian drama. Now it was all too much of a downer. The much-awaited counteroffensive of 2023 failed to produce all the vaunted results promised. No one drank any triumphant coffee in Crimea, apart from probably the Russians. Russia kept on creeping forward on the frontlines. The city of Bakhmut was lost, at major cost to the Ukrainian troops defending it all those months.

Could Ukraine really win? Were all the hundreds of billions of dollars and euros sent worth it? The deindustrialization and drastically higher energy prices in Europe? The tens, hundreds of thousands men killed in a conflict the Europeans and Americans encouraged the Ukrainians to keep on fighting?

Kursk dispelled these doubts. Or at least, that’s what the western press jubilantly crowed. How much euphoria they must have felt at the time. That was precisely the word used in Ukrainian media at the time — euphoria. As for the western media and political class, they could once again rest assured in their beloved conviction — the plucky Ukraine is once again shattering the Russian paper tiger. Pessimists at home are wrong to doubt the supremacy of our excellent democracies, our glorious Civilization. The Ukrainians aren’t just dying for our ideals, but winning!

American think tanks wrote articles on ‘the operational and strategic genius of the Kursk offensive’. The press was ecstatic.

While Ukrainian troops have long been driven out of Kursk, the assault units have continued their symbiotic relationship with the western press in 2026. This year, they’ve also been engaged in endless counter-attacks.

The first place they’ve been active is the southern section of the front, the Zaporizhzhia and Dnepropetrovsk oblasts. There were massive desertions here from other Ukrainian units in 2025 and early 2026, and massive retreats. The assault units stabilized the situation, partly through executing deserters, but also by conducting new, endless counterattacks.

Though some Ukrainian analysts sometimes spoke of the strategic need to prevent Russia from mounting a large offensive towards the major city of Zaporizhzhia, Zelensky seemed to have another interest in these Ukrainian counterattacks. He has constantly been making statements on the territories retaken by assault units in the south.

There was even talk of a ‘southern counteroffensive’ at the start of the year, though that eventually fizzled out. While that frenzy was ongoing, western observers convinced themselves yet again that ‘Ukraine has turned the tide of the war’. The American Institute for the Study of War, headed by neocon nobility Kimberley Kagan, assured readers that Ukraine was now taking more territory than Russia.

In short, Zelensky and the press keep talking about all the villages retaken here, generally neglecting the fact that these settlements had populations you could count on two hands, even before 2022. Zelensky’s claims of ‘300 square kilometers’ retaken were also disputed by most Ukrainian military analysts, who believed that it was more like ~75 square kilometers. Later, Zelensky upped the ante to 400 square kilometers, with Ukrainian analysts just as skeptical.

Nothing particularly impressive has been achieved by these southern counterattacks. Russian troops continued advancing simultaneously in the same area. And Ukrainian military analysts also continually rued the massive losses the assault forces took in these operations.

In short, this was another PR operation. Ukraine’s southern steppe is a territory quite difficult to defend due to the lack of urban infrastructure. This makes it somewhat easy to kill or force away enemy troops from a village. The problem is that once you take their positions, you too will be hammered from the skies. However, at least you can claim to the press that you ‘liberated’ the territory, even if you’ll have to leave it within a few weeks (if you survive).

Something even more farcical took place in another place the assault units were particularly active this year — the Donetsk oblast city of Pokrovsk. Russia took the city at the end of 2025. But the Ukrainian government and its western supporters were loath to admit the strategic city was lost. And the assault units conducted endless operations to enter Pokrovsk and film themselves holding up a flag there. Other Ukrainian soldiers complained that dozens of men were being killed for these stunts. But that didn’t matter — it showed that ‘Pokrovsk holds’.

There was a particularly gruesome such case in April of this year, when a large group of troops from the 425th assault regiments were killed during a suicide mission towards a village near Pokrovsk.

The last, probably most caricatural such case took place in mid-July. Syrsky was about to be sacked, and his assault units faced ever more criticism. So the infamous 425th assault regiments entered the Donetsk city of Kostiantynivka, by this time under near-total Russian control. They held up a flag with Syrsky and Zelensky’s face on it. They were soon captured by the Russians and forced to hold up a Russian flag. The 425th eventually admitted that the men were taken hostage and didn’t deny the veracity of the video with Syrsky and Zelensky’s faces. However, on a positive note, the 425th highlighted that ‘at least they aren’t dead’, which is both not necessarily true and hardly reassuring.

All of these cases have little to do with military logic. They have much more to do with constructing a certain image of reality for civilian audiences, particularly western ones. It has been a somewhat misguided enterprise to accuse commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky of responsibility in all this. He was just following orders. He got them from Ukraine’s president, a showman by profession, one that adores applause and abhors silence. And the president, in turn, gets his incentives from abroad.

That’s why the western journalists that packaged this theatre also have blood on their hands. Not that they’ll ever lose any sleep over it.

Anyway, all of these factors aren’t likely to change any soon. And since Ukraine’s army is made up of forcibly mobilized citizens who don’t much fancy the idea of dying, let alone for such obviously idiotic goals, I don’t see how the forms of discipline used by the assault units are going anywhere.

Nor are western journalists likely to die out any time soon. Their human material in the eastern steppes, however, is quite depletable.