Russia sends army recruits to fight in Ukraine after a few days of training

Less than two weeks after joining forces, Ivan was on the front lines of Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine and participating in attacks on Ukrainian positions.

Ivan, 31, who requested anonymity to protect his security, said he received just five days of training before being transferred to Ukraine and swept into the war.

“There was a soldier in our company who did not know how a machine gun worked. So I taught the guy how to disassemble and assemble a machine gun. I don’t want to be next to him in battle. How can you fight like that?” he told The Moscow Times.

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Providing minimal training to new recruits appears to be increasingly common in the Russian military as the war in Ukraine nears its sixth month and the high casualty rate combined with a lack of general mobilization to create serious manpower shortages.

According to military analysts and human rights activists, this lack of knowledge leaves soldiers without the combat skills needed to survive on the battlefield.

“A week [of training] is nothing – for a soldier, it’s a direct path to a hospital or a body bag,” independent military analyst Pavel Luzhin told The Moscow Times.

According to Russia’s Defense Ministry website, four weeks of intensive combined arms training with a “survival” course is “essential” for anyone signing a contract with the Russian military. The program takes a total of 240 hours and includes shooting, grenade throwing, and the study of military strategy.

However, amid the war in Ukraine, it appears that training standards are not being followed, according to Sergei Krivenko, director of the human rights group Citizen. army. law. Which provides legal aid to Russian soldiers.

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“I regularly contact parents whose children signed a [military] contract and ended up in Ukraine a week later,” Krivenko told The Moscow Times.

Ivan signed a three-month contract with the Defense Ministry in April.

“When the special military operation began – although in fact, it is a war – I took it as a personal tragedy,” Ivan said. “I told myself I wanted to go there and no one would stop me. I am a patriot.”

He was soon transferred to a military base in the Russian city of Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine. Less than two weeks later, he found himself on the front lines.

“After all the medical check-ups, they asked me if I was ready to go to the military base the day after tomorrow. They trained us for five days, we waited for another five days for the rotation of the force and then we went to [fighter] positions,” he said in a phone interview.

In the five days that Ivan and other soldiers were waiting to be deployed to Ukraine, they did some informal training exercises.

Similar accounts of new recruits receiving minimal training have appeared in the Russian media in recent weeks.

“I was shocked. Some people have not held machine guns properly in their hands, they have never seen real tanks, and they are leaving for the front line in a few days,” an anonymous soldier told the BBC last month. Said in an interview with the Russian service.

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Yevgeny Chubarin, 24, was killed just four days after being transferred to a Belgorod military base in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region on a three-month contract with the Russian military, independent news outlet Mediazona reported last month. “There was no training,” his mother Nina Chubarina told Mediazona. “They arrived, got a uniform and a machine gun – and that’s it, move on.”

While most Russian men have completed at least one year of compulsory military service in the Russian Armed Forces, training is considered essential to update and refresh their skills, which can be several years old.

Under Russian law, they cannot be sent to war unless they have had at least four months of training. According to expert Luzhin, the same logic should apply to those who signed contracts with the military to go to Ukraine.

According to Ivan, the five days of training he received was “intense”.

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During training, all soldiers were treated equally, regardless of experience. According to Ivan, the majority had not previously been in a war zone, although there were some who had battlefield experience, including Russia’s military operations in Syria and the North Caucasus Republic of Chechnya.

“We were at the training ground from 10 am to 7 pm. We practiced combat skills, seizing and storming buildings, all around defense, working in combat teams, field medicine, evacuation and healing of wounded soldiers. The focus was on the skills you needed for your position – a machine gunner, a grenade launcher operator and so on,” Ivan said.

While such basic instruction may be enough to allow soldiers to perform simple tasks in combat, military experts told The Moscow Times that military training should be much broader.

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Russia sends army recruits to fight in Ukraine after a few days of training

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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by News East India staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)