The furious reaction of Russian soldiers was filmed just moments after they were told that they were being reassigned from Territorial Defences to “stormtroopers” in the Ukraine war.
In the video, several Russian troops raged at the betrayal, with three of them speaking directly to the camera. One soldier said they “were lied to” by their commanders, as another added the military would “sell them out in Ukraine”.
The social media account Visegrad 24 tweeted the video, which was posted on Telegram, adding: “A Russian military unit is upset with its commanders after having been reclassified from territorial defense into stormtroopers They say that they haven’t even been able to practice shooting for weeks, and now suddenly they are to storm Ukrainian trenches.”
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The soldier in the video tells the camera: “We have been here since the 26th of November. Our officers lied to our faces that we are Territorial Defences.
“The Lt. Colonel just came out and said we are now a motor rifle unit. We are stormtroopers! We’re stormtroopers now – not Territorial Defences.”
He added: “They just told us! They lied to us! We haven’t held guns for two weeks. We went to the shooting range to throw grenades, but they had run out of them.”
Another soldier chimed in: “They didn’t even have a bus for us, we had to walk 10km from here to there.”
A third soldier tells the camera: “How the f*** are we meant to fight under these officers? They will sell us out in Ukraine. F*******!”
The video comes less than 24 hours after a similar rant from a frontline soldier who accuses Vladimir Putin of neglecting the country’s troops in Ukraine. The soldier deployed near Marinka in Donetsk says that the Russian leadership has left the forces “rot in the trenches”.
This follows a new intelligence briefing from the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) which suggests some Ukrainian and Russian troops have likely been enduring large rodent infestations on the front lines. Unverified reports claim that Russian units are beginning to experience heightened sickness cases attributed to the pest problem.
