Free Republic

At least six Russian regions have scrapped 9 May Victory Day parades that mark the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany amid fears over Ukrainian strikes, with a region 400 miles from the border being the latest to cancel. The governor of Saratov announced the parade there would not go ahead because of “safety concerns”, adding to a string of cancellations that are a glaring admission of the country’s military vulnerability more than 14 months into the war. Earlier, heads of Belgorod, Kursk, Voronezh, Oryol, and Pskov region, as well as the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, similarly cancelled their annual military parades....

Out on the frontline, near the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman, on 8 November at 15.10, a Russian serviceman called Andrey decided to ignore the orders of his superiors and call his mother with an unauthorised mobile phone. “No one feeds us anything, mum,” he complained. “Our supply is s**t, to be honest. We draw water from puddles, then we strain it and drink it.” Russian forces had been on the back foot in the Donetsk oblast for weeks. Lyman, taken by the Russians in May, was liberated by Ukrainian forces in October. Two days before Andrey made his afternoon...

Hours after Aleksei Agafonov arrived in the Luhansk region on 1 November as part of a battalion of new conscripts, his unit were handed shovels and ordered to dig trenches throughout the night. Their digging, which they took turns to do because of the lack of available shovels, was abruptly interrupted in the early hours of the next day as Ukrainian artillery lit up the sky and shells started raining down on Agafonov and his unit. “A Ukrainian drone first flew over us, and after that their artillery started to pound us for hours and hours, nonstop,” Agafonov, who survived...

When her recently mobilised brother rang from the frontline last week, Olesya Shishkanova recorded the phone call – and with it, a litany of complaints. “They gave us absolutely no equipment. The army has nothing, we had to buy all our gear ourselves,” complained Vladimir, 23, who was conscripted as part of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation earlier this month. “I even had to paint my gun to cover the rust. It is a nightmare ... Soon they’ll make us buy our own grenades,” he added in the call that Shishkanova uploaded on her page on the Russian social media site VK....

The new commander of the Russian army in Ukraine, Sergei Surovikin, said on Tuesday that civilians were being “resettled” from the Russian-occupied southern city of Kherson, describing the military situation in Ukraine as “tense.” “The enemy continually attempts to attack the positions of Russian troops,” Surovikin said in his first televised interview since his appointment last week, adding that the situation was particularly difficult around the occupied southern city of Kherson. “Further actions regarding Kherson will depend on the developing military and tactical situation, which is not easy, and difficult decisions cannot be ruled out,” he said.

Key figures including Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin are using military defeats to undermine defence chief Sergei Shoigu. Friends, rivals and enemies took their seats in the Grand Kremlin Palace as Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s elite to formalise Russia’s illegal annexation of four occupied regions in Ukraine. The ceremony was meant to portray strength and unity, but within 24 hours had been overshadowed by Russia’s failures on the battlefield. These losses, which continued into this week on the southern and eastern fronts in Ukraine, have led to a major, unprecedented rupture within the ruling class as the Kremlin seeks scapegoats...

After Russia’s chaotic retreats in Kherson – less than a week after Vladimir Putin illegally annexed the Ukrainian province alongside three others – the region’s Moscow-appointed governor, Kirill Stremousov, sought to calm the mood. Far from a rout, the withdrawal was a tactical “regrouping” to “deliver a retaliatory blow”, Stremousov said on Wednesday. His comments – among the first public admissions of Russia’s retreats in Kherson – attempted to mask what even many vocal supporters of the war now say: the situation is the most dire the Russian army has found itself in since the start of the invasion seven...

Still getting used to the feel of his gun and military fatigues, Anton suddenly found himself surrounded by Ukrainian forces as bullets flew by, with one striking his arm. “It was our first confrontation with the enemy; we hadn’t even fired a shot. They ambushed us, and we couldn’t fight back. We had to surrender,” said Anton, a 21-year-old Russian serviceman, in an interview with the Guardian. Anton was taken captive by Ukrainian forces near Mykolaiv on 2 March with five other soldiers from his unit, as Russian forces were staging an offensive on the strategically important shipbuilding city near...

A trip to the mall in Russia is a different experience today than it was just a few short months ago. “When I had my first child, there was all this choice. Mothercare, Zara, you name it,” said Evgenia Marsheva, a 33-year-old architect. But when she went shopping in Moscow this month for her newborn, many of those large retail brands had been shuttered. “Now, I can only find very cheap or extremely expensive Russian products. I was brought up with tales of the limited choices that my parents had during the Soviet Union. I never thought that would come...

Troops are saying no to officers, knowing that punishment is light while Russia is not technically at war. When the soldiers of an elite Russian army brigade were told in early April to prepare for a second deployment to Ukraine, fear broke out among the ranks. The unit, stationed in Russia’s far east during peacetime, first entered Ukraine from Belarus when the war started at the end of February and saw bitter combat with Ukrainian forces. “It soon became clear that not everyone was onboard with it. Many of us simply did not want to go back,” said Dmitri, a...

Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu, is convening a meeting of her security council on Tuesday following a series of incidents in the breakaway Moldovan republic of Transnistria and a warning from Moscow that the Russian-backed region could be drawn into the war in Ukraine. Transnistria, which borders western Ukraine, is controlled by pro-Russia separatists and permanently hosts 1,500 Russian troops as well as a large arms depot. Last week, a senior Russian commander said the goal of Russia’s new offensive was to seize control of southern Ukraine and to gain access to Transnistria, creating worries that the small east European country...