DONETSK (Realist English). I want to dwell on two very difficult issues that are now more relevant than ever before. The first is on general mobilization. I stay by my opinion, which sounds like this: against. And it is justified as follows… As they write, under Balakleya, our mobilized guys were not properly equipped and outfitted. My son-in-law, who is fighting in the Kherson direction as a conscript, recently came home on leave, and I dressed him and equipped him again, and his colleagues were already lined up for what I gave him for the first time, even though it was pretty battered after five months of fighting. Yesterday, in the case I described above, we also dealt with the mobilized — they were not given the means of night surveillance, and they look so-so, to be honest…. Still need to continue? Tell me, is this the attitude towards our mobilized, or is the situation in general not very good? I believe that the second is true.
I see how some people want the president to make this decision, and agents of influence are coming into play, who are trying to form the opinion that we will not win without general mobilization — be careful: when incompetent commanders drive untrained crowds of unequipped people to correct the situation, it will end not good in any military or social sense. Now, at this stage, we need to increase the effectiveness of what we have and activate the volunteer movement in Russia. A scheme with recruitment for money is, of course, a way out — but the money earned needs to be spent in the future, and for this you need to survive, sometimes at the cost of cowardice.
Now, about increasing the efficiency — and this is point number two. I publicly touched on this topic only once, in my opinion, but from the very first weeks of the special operation, in various notes and recommendations at various levels, I repeated: penal battalions and military field courts. I am even more humane than I would like, but my experience of creating a volunteer formation has shown that there is always a black sheep, and my isolation ward has never been empty. I’ll give you a hard example already about current situation: at the beginning of the battles, I found a group of fighters talking, in which one of them was particularly zealously telling that “we are here like cannon fodder …”. I caught him by the tongue and demanded that he explain himself… It is certainly impossible to say about me or my officers that we treat the fighters as cannon fodder…
I then noticed this “people’s tribune” — he is from the composition recruited from the beginning of the operation — and yesterday this bastard managed to get drunk while on vacation after rotation, he went out with a machine gun to the locality where the Permanent deployment point is located, and started shooting at civilians, wounding one. Of course, he was captured, during the detention, as usual, an adequate approach was applied, so that an almost insensible body was pushed into the prison truck — but this is not an isolated case! Back in Mariupol, the same freak from the same category shot at his commander and disabled him… And do you think there are not enough commanders for whom the penal battalion is crying for criminal actions? And there are enough of them. One was taken here, who had not been in the entrusted unit — just in the Kharkov direction — only drank and solved his personal issues, but they let him go…
It is unpleasant to say this, but there is a war going on, and military approaches are needed — then we will win. And for this it is necessary to revise the system of relations in the state. And when they ask me why there is no single management body, I answer that there used to be three “keys”, and now there are five… This takes place during the war. Our local authorities are now fully denominated, and even the defense committee has been turned into a tool for legitimizing new acquisitions. And Russian officials are satisfied with everything: everyone is responsible for their own, so as not to share responsibility, and as a result, seven nannies have a child without supervision… Let’s do something radically, guys, but using our heads, thinking about the consequences.
Alexander Khodakovsky is Commander of the Vostok battalion of the Donetsk People’s Republic
