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This transcript was created with speech popularity software. Although it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the audio of the episode before quoting this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes. com if you have any questions.
From the New York Times, I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is The Daily.
Russia’s military unrest explained its war against Ukraine and was exemplified through a major attack this week, in which dozens of Russian infantrymen were killed as they slept in their barracks. Today, my colleague Michael Schwirtz interviews Russian infantrymen and shows new main points about how this military superpower continues to make the same mistakes and that’s why, despite all this, its infantrymen continue to fight.
It’s Wednesday, January 4.
So, Mike, you’ve researched this consultation that I think many of us have been doing, those of us who have been paying attention to the war in Ukraine. And that’s what Russia, and I think to some extent the world, devises. Russia would rush and completely defeat the Ukrainians, right?As if they were driving in the capital, taking it in 3 days, the war would end. But this clearly did not happen, not even close. So you and our colleagues to take an in-depth look at how Russian forces failed so badly. Tell me what you did.
What my colleagues and I decided to do was to delve deeper into the question of why this army that advanced the total global idea was huge, deadly, threatening: how could they not carry out the war plans that everyone imagined?, what did the Russians imagine, what did the West imagine? And one of the vital questions I sought to answer was how the Russians themselves viewed this war, what they thought about what they were doing and what they thought about its success, how they evaluated their performance.
So we worked hard to find copies of Russian correspondence records, call logs, war plans, and we went through and interviewed as many Russian infantrymen as we could locate as well. It was in prisoner-of-war camps. It was through the telephone, the Russians we could succeed who had been on the battlefield and had returned to Russia.
So, what I found. Where to start?
Well, we can start at the beginning. And what everyone wants to perceive is how confident the Russians were. They planned to take Ukraine and overthrow the government in Kyiv, the capital. The troops would come from 3 sides, they would take the government and that would be the end of the war. .
Great.
But when we talked to the Russian infantrymen, we learned that they had no idea what this plan was. Many of them only discovered it a few hours before the war began. I talked to a corporal named Nikita Chibrin. He is 27 years old. Old soldier in a motorized infantry brigade. And he said he spent a month before the war in Belarus, which is the country north of Ukraine, in what he and his fellow infantrymen had learned as an exercise in education, yet what he described as more like camping. No army training was involved.
And on February 23, the day before the invasion was announced, he and his unit were in their camp celebrating the Day of the Defender of the Fatherland, which is a Russian national holiday for the military. And they were eating candy for the instance when their commander approached. . And the commander just told them, and I quote, “tomorrow they’re going to Ukraine fucking shit. “And beyond that, they didn’t win other orders.
Another soldier we interviewed who was stationed in Belarus said he learned he was going to war just an hour before his unit started walking. that.
God, that’s incredible. It is amazing that they knew so little and were so ill-prepared. And in his opinion, they were so overconfident. They thought it would be fun. But as the war ended quickly, it simply began to drag on.
Droite. Et was devastating, especially for Russian troops on the ground who first entered Ukraine. Very quickly, they came here under incredibly heavy fire from Ukrainian troops who were in smaller, more agile units, and not only many infantrymen died, but also many of the top elite troops in Russia. These are the special forces units. These are the airborne units, and lots and heaps have died.
IT IS OK. So, from the beginning, the Russians lost many of their highly professional boys, and that was a big challenge for them. So how did they fix this? For example, how did the Russian army find a way out of this scenario in which it found itself?
Well, the first thing they did was withdraw all their troops from northern Ukraine and Kiev. The plan was to reconsolidate them in the east and south and reconstitute some of those groups that had been decimated. But what they really needed was more people, so the Kremlin and the army began looking for tactics to locate their forces with more men.
One of the things they did was turn to a mercenary organization called Wagner that had reveled in the Middle East and Africa. And they are highly professional soldiers.
So, in other words, because Russia loses all its experienced boys, in a kind of desperate move, they turn to this mercenary organization, the Wagner organization. Remind us who they are.
This is an organization that started ten years ago and has the appearance of an army contractor. He started through this guy called Yevgeny Prigozhin. He is a businessman who has organized events in the Kremlin in the past, so he has a connection. Vladimir Putin.
Catering
He is a hotelier and entrepreneur. He has had very large catering contracts for the army, catering in Russian schools, and has been photographed serving food to Vladimir Putin at state receptions.
And Mike, why would a catering provider lead a militia?
This is one of the mysteries of the Wagner group, how he came to lead a militia. It was only in the last few months that Prigozhin assumed the duty of founding the Wagner Group. In the past, he even denied their lifestyles and sued. Hounds who claimed he was everything.
Oh, interesting. So it’s like a secret thing?
It’s a secret thing, but a very, very open secret. These guys have operated all over the world. They operated in Libya, in Syria. And basically, what it is, it’s an undeniable weapon of the Russian army. It works semi-autonomously. From what we know from our reports, they make decisions on their own, but they are definitely a tool in the Kremlin’s arsenal. They pursue the Kremlin’s geopolitical goals, only they are denied.
So if Wagner operates somewhere in Syria, gets into trouble because of human rights abuses, in fact it happened, the Kremlin can say it knew nothing about it. They don’t know who those other people are.
Not bad. Interesting.
But the fact is that those guys have genuine military experience, and that’s not something you can say about the top of the Russian army. The Russian military hasn’t fought a war like this in decades. They fight for miles of territory, fight in trench warfare, compete for positions. Nobody has that kind of experience, nobody still has those Wagnerian troupes.
IT IS OK. So they move on to this group of Wagner, this restoration, for experienced men, mainly, but what happens next?What’s he doing?
Well, Prigozhin’s role is to bring in those experienced guys, but Russia also wants bodies. And Prigozhin offers what might be called an artistic solution. He began recruiting men from prisons to send to the front.
Wow. So it’s a step.
Great.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And then those videos start to look like him going to those prisons and recruiting prisoners.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And he throws them this patriotic launch. It’s like, look, you. You’re here. How about converting your life and doing something for the country?
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
If you do, we will forgive you. You will get a blank slate. You will be able to resume your life and live a general life at home, if ArrayIf you do not –
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
“We’re going to make sure he’s honored, buried in a sacred place, rewarded. You will not be remembered as an inmate in a prison. You will be remembered as a hero in Russia. “
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And other people sign up? For example, do other people in prisons buy what Prigozhin sells?
Ouais. Je means that, as far as we know, many of those inmates have accepted Prigozhin for this treatment. The challenge is that they are not the most reliable soldiers.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
I met one of the incarcerated named Yevgeny Nuzhin
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
This boy is 55 years old. He is serving a sentence for murder. He has been in prison for more than 20 years.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And Prigozhin arrives at his in August. He is on the ground in Ukraine in September.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And his job, he says, is necessarily to be in a trench and, at nightfall, go to the battlefield and retrieve the bodies of dead Wagnerian soldiers.
God.
That’s their job, and it gives you a sense of the carnage that’s happening there. But he doesn’t stay. He doesn’t stay.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
His plan from the beginning, he said, to settle for the deal and escape. And that’s precisely what he did.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
On his best day at the front, he passed by to pass out and make his paintings collecting bodies, but instead wandered along the lines and encountered an organization of very surprised Ukrainian infantrymen who. . .
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
– knocked him out and tied him up. And when he woke up, he stopped in Ukraine, that’s where I met him in October.
And what did he do to you?
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
He was proud of what he had done.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And he said, what has Putin done well since coming to power?Did he do well?
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
He said he thought the war would be Putin’s grave.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And a lot of Wagnerian infantrymen were killed. The vast majority, according to the intelligence of the Ukrainian army, are the detainees who have just been sent to the front, so we can judge, to serve as cannon fodder, to shoot the bullets of the Ukrainian forces and exhaust them.
IT IS OK. So, at the end of the day, the Wagner Group is not reversing the war. And at the same time, it’s terrible carnage in the position those guys end up in. So you can believe why someone like Yevgeny, the guy you talked to. a, made the decision to flee. Right? Mike, what happened to Yevgeny?
Well, when Yevgeny accepted this deal, Pripasszhin issued a warning. He said that any of those detainees who made the decision to move to Ukraine and fight for Russia in Ukraine, if it was found that they had defected, that they were surrendering. , who had fled the battlefield, would have serious consequences. He said in one of his videos that they would be shot. And after we spoke, Yevgeny discovered that it was in the hands of Wagner’s fighters.
Oh, dear. Exchanged?
Yes. As a result of a prisoner exchange. The Ukrainians gave it back to the Russians, and the next time I saw it in a video it gave the impression of being online. And Yevgeny’s head was stuck to a block, and on top of him was this camouflaged guy holding a mace. And in this video, Yevgeny speaks. He said he woke up in a basement and said he was going to be tried.
And when he says that, the guy with the hammer knocks him down and crushes his skull.
My God, Mike. Es like an ISIS beheading video.
It’s very similar to that, and if there was any doubt about how Prigozhin felt about it, he issued an endorsement of Yevgeny’s murder. He said that Yevgeny had betrayed his people, betrayed his comrades, consciously betrayed them. He planned his escape. Nuzhin is a traitor. It was issued some time after the execution.
And what I think happens here is that it’s kind of like a test balloon. Russia is in danger in Ukraine and wants solutions. And Prigozhin was led to find solutions. And he discovered this over-solution, this point of terror, to maintain control and maintain order in the ranks of Russian foot soldiers in Ukraine. It is unclear whether this kind of remedy will be extended to the rest of the Russian military, but it is the Kremlin. who is suffering to find answers on how to correct shipping in Ukraine and start making a profit.
[MUSIC IN PROGRESS]
‘Ll.
So, Mike, you took us in early fall. The Russian military has not met its own expectations. They fight with their Plan B and Plan C, wasting tons of their own men and starting to use brutal tactics to keep them in line. . And we know that until September, Putin announces a compulsory military service to have even more men. So what is going on internally in the Russian military right now?What effect does this have?
Well, the only main effect it has is that it takes about 250,300,000 Russian men who, during the first five or six months of this war, saw it behind the scenes, most commonly on his couch, on Russian television, and threw them out. to the front lines with a little politeness and very little sense of what they were meant to do. I was able to touch several infantrymen of the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, which is a unit founded in the Russian Far East. of Ukraine as you can imagine and still be in Russia. I spoke to them weeks after they were written and they described a scene of utter horror and chaos.
They groped onto the battlefield through those crater farms in those fields without maps, medical kits, or functional walkie-talkies, without any ability to talk to each other. A platoon doctor, a former bartender who had never gained medical training.
Oh.
And they ordered them to go ahead, to cross those fields with those Kalashnikov rifles that were manufactured in the 60s and with almost nothing to eat. one-year recruits. They had no artillery. They had no air cover. They had very little ammunition.
But when they describe this, they say they weren’t afraid of any of those situations at first because their commanders promised them they would never see a fight. And it wasn’t until Ukrainian shells began crashing into their heads and shattering their comrades. in pieces that they learned had been deceived. And I talked to the members of a platoon. They entered with 60 men on the march. In a single day, 40 of them were killed.
God.
On a four-hour single stretch in Ukraine.
Wow. I mean, it’s cannon fodder.
Exactly.
I mean, it’s as if the Russian army isn’t informed at all. It’s just one mistake after another, and you’d think they’d recalibrate at some point, but they’re not. For example, they continue to throw bodies into this challenge and have them destroyed.
And that’s the challenge we met at the very beginning of the war, Y. These challenges persisted everywhere. And the foot soldiers I spoke to about the 155th understood it intrinsically. I spoke to one of the survivors, a Russian soldier named Alexander, as he was recovering in an army hospital in southern Russia. Battlefield, all he saw were legs, guts, and flesh. He said, I know it sounds terrible, but it can’t be described any other way. People have become hamburgers.
Dieu. Et Mike, how did you feel after all this?For example, you would speak to him from an army hospital after, of course, that he had already been wounded and had returned to Russia. For example, was he angry with the Russians. army, as well as with their commanders?
I mean, what made him the most angry were the lies. He was lied to through the Russian media, who told him from his couch in Russia’s Far East as he watched this war in its first months that everything was going according to plan, that everything was going well. They lied to him through his commanders, who said he would only fill one role and would not be at the front. These were other people who were surely not prepared to be sent to war, and yet they were sent to war anyway.
Alexander told me that he recruited in September with 3 of his close friends from the formative years. He is in hospital following a severe concussion caused by the bombing of his unit. Another of 4 friends who suffered similar injuries in the hospital with a concussion. his legs. And the 4th is missing.
Oh, it’s devastating. And only a general for human life.
But what he told me is that he completely expects to be discharged from the hospital, as his injuries are minor, and when he does, he will return to Ukraine and do so of his own free will.
In fact?
It would possibly oppose the way war is fought, but it is not opposed to war.
But why would I come back, Mike, after all this?The loss of his friends, what he saw, why?
What I discovered most desirable about Alexander is that he understood that Russian infantrymen on the ground were being treated. He understood that the war is going badly despite what Russian propaganda tells him. But his bottom line is that he can’t do anything about it. which is their destiny in life. It’s that kind of ambivalent fatalism you encounter when you communicate with a lot of those foot soldiers.
He told me in our conversation, that’s how we were raised. We grew up in our country understanding that it doesn’t matter how our country treats us. Maybe it’s bad. Maybe that’s good. Possibly there will be things we don’t like about our government. But he added that when a scenario like this presents itself, we get up and leave.
This is the eternity of Russia.
And I think it shows that this war can continue thanks to other people like Alexander, who suffer the most and are aware that they are being treated like garbage. If those other people are in a position to stand up and return to Ukraine and continue. This war, who happens to end it?
No matter how many tactical mistakes the Russian military makes, how trustworthy, how resilient it is to receiving informed lessons, despite all this, the Kremlin knows that it can count on other people who are content to settle for things. It can go a long time.
Exactly.
Mike, thank you
Gladly.
‘Ll.
[MUSIC IN PROGRESS]
Here’s what you want to know most today.
Madam Secretary, on behalf of the House Republican Conference, I rise to nominate California President Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House to lead the new Republican majority in the United States.
In dramatic opposition to their own leader, an organization of far-right Republicans rejected Representative Kevin McCarthy as the next speaker of the House in another 3 rounds of voting, denying him the 218 votes he needed.
No user won the majority of the total number of votes through the last name. No speakers were elected.
It was a humiliating setback for McCarthy, who struggled to convince right-wing lawmakers to accept his truth. McCarthy could only lose the votes of 4 Republican colleagues. Instead, it lost as many as 20. After the third vote, the House adjourned without opting for a leader, something that had not happened in nearly a hundred years.
In accordance with the procedure followed by the House in 1923, the Secretary ordered the Secretary-Reader to proceed with a new appeal.
According to House regulations, voting for the speaker will resume later in the day and continue until a speaker is elected. an NFL primetime game. In a big move, the NFL suspended play after Hamlin collapsed on the field. It was the latest incident to raise questions about the protection of players in professional football.
Today’s episode produced by Clare Toeniskoetter and Luke Vander Ploeg. Edited by Marc Georges and Lisa Chow, with assistance from Paige Cowett, it comprises Anastasia Vorozhtsov’s translations of Rowan Niemisto’s original music and designed by Chris Wood. Our main theme is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.
That’s it for The Quotidien. Je am Sabrina Tavernise.
transcription
This transcript was created with speech popularity software. Although it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the audio of the episode before quoting this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes. com if you have any questions.
From the New York Times, I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is The Daily.
Russia’s military unrest explained its war against Ukraine and was exemplified through a major attack this week, in which dozens of Russian infantrymen were killed as they slept in their barracks. Today, my colleague Michael Schwirtz interviews Russian infantrymen and shows new main points about how this military superpower continues to make the same mistakes and that’s why, despite all this, its infantrymen continue to fight.
It’s Wednesday, January 4.
Mike, you’ve researched this question that I think many of us have asked, those of us who have paid attention to the war in Ukraine. And is this, that Russia, and I think to some extent the world, would think that Russia would rush in and defeat the Ukrainians completely, right?As if they entered the capital, took it in 3 days, the war would end. But that evidently didn’t happen, not even close. Therefore, you and our colleagues have to read about the intensity of how Russian forces failed so badly. So tell me what you did.
What my colleagues and I decided to do was to delve deeper into the question of why this army that advanced the total global idea was huge, deadly, threatening: how could they not carry out the war plans that everyone imagined?, what did the Russians imagine, what did the West imagine? And one of the vital questions I sought to answer was how the Russians themselves viewed this war, what they thought about what they were doing and what they thought about its success, how they evaluated their performance.
So we worked hard to find copies of Russian correspondence records, call logs, war plans, and we went through and interviewed as many Russian infantrymen as we could locate as well. It was in prisoner-of-war camps. It was through the telephone, the Russians we could succeed who had been on the battlefield and had returned to Russia.
So, what I found. Where to start?
Well, we can start at the beginning. And what everyone wants to perceive is how confident the Russians were. They planned to take Ukraine and overthrow the government in Kyiv, the capital. The troops would come from 3 sides, they would take the government and that would be the end of the war. .
Great.
But when we talked to the Russian infantrymen, we learned that they had no idea what this plan was. Many of them only discovered it a few hours before the war began. I talked to a corporal named Nikita Chibrin. He is 27 years old. Old soldier in a motorized infantry brigade. And he said he spent a month before the war in Belarus, which is the country north of Ukraine, in what he and his fellow infantrymen had learned as an exercise in education, yet what he described as more like camping. No army training was involved.
And on February 23, the day before the invasion was announced, he and his unit were in their camp celebrating the Day of the Defender of the Fatherland, which is a Russian national holiday for the military. And they were eating candy for the instance when their commander approached. . And the commander just told them, and I quote, “tomorrow they’re going to Ukraine fucking shit. “And beyond that, they didn’t win other orders.
Another soldier we interviewed who was stationed in Belarus said he learned he was going to war just an hour before his unit started walking. that.
God, that’s incredible. It is amazing that they knew so little and were so ill-prepared. And in his opinion, they were so overconfident. They thought it would be fun. But as the war ended quickly, it simply began to drag on.
Droite. Et was devastating, especially for Russian troops on the ground who first entered Ukraine. Very quickly, they came here under incredibly heavy fire from Ukrainian troops who were in smaller, more agile units, and not only many infantrymen died, but also many of the top elite troops in Russia. These are the special forces units. These are the airborne units, and lots and heaps have died.
IT IS OK. So, from the beginning, the Russians lost many of their highly professional boys, and that was a big challenge for them. So how did they fix this? For example, how did the Russian army find a way out of this scenario in which it found itself?
Well, the first thing they did was withdraw all their troops from northern Ukraine and Kiev. The plan was to reconsolidate them in the east and south and reconstitute some of those groups that had been decimated. But what they really needed was more people, so the Kremlin and the army began looking for tactics to locate their forces with more men.
One of the things they did was turn to a mercenary organization called Wagner that had reveled in the Middle East and Africa. And they are highly professional soldiers.
So, in other words, because Russia loses all its experienced boys, in a kind of desperate move, they turn to this mercenary organization, the Wagner organization. Remind us who they are.
This is an organization that started ten years ago and has the appearance of an army contractor. He started through this guy called Yevgeny Prigozhin. He is a businessman who has organized events in the Kremlin in the past, so he has a connection. Vladimir Putin.
Catering
He is a hotelier and entrepreneur. He has had very large catering contracts for the army, catering in Russian schools, and has been photographed serving food to Vladimir Putin at state receptions.
And Mike, why would a catering provider lead a militia?
This is one of the mysteries of the Wagner group, how he came to lead a militia. It was only in the last few months that Prigozhin assumed the duty of founding the Wagner Group. In the past, he even denied their lifestyles and sued. Hounds who claimed he was everything.
Oh, interesting. So it’s like a secret thing?
It’s a secret thing, but a very, very open secret. These guys have operated all over the world. They operated in Libya, in Syria. And basically, what it is, it’s an undeniable weapon of the Russian army. It works semi-autonomously. From what we know from our reports, they make decisions on their own, but they are definitely a tool in the Kremlin’s arsenal. They pursue the Kremlin’s geopolitical goals, only they are denied.
So if Wagner operates somewhere in Syria, gets into trouble because of human rights abuses, in fact it happened, the Kremlin can say it knew nothing about it. They don’t know who those other people are.
LAW. Interesting.
But the fact is that those guys have genuine military experience, and that’s not something you can say about the top of the Russian army. The Russian military hasn’t fought a war like this in decades. They fight for miles of territory, fight in trench warfare, compete for positions. Nobody has that kind of experience, nobody still has those Wagnerian troupes.
IT IS OK. So they move on to this group of Wagner, this restoration, for experienced men, mainly, but what happens next?What’s he doing?
Well, Prigozhin’s role is to bring in those experienced guys, but Russia also wants bodies. And Prigozhin offers what might be called an artistic solution. He began recruiting men from prisons to send to the front.
Wow. So it’s a step.
Great.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And then those videos start to look like him going to those prisons and recruiting prisoners.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And he throws them this patriotic launch. It’s like, look, you. You’re here. How about converting your life and doing something for the country?
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
If you do, we will forgive you. You will get a blank slate. You will be able to resume your life and live a general life at home, if ArrayIf you don’t:
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
“We’re going to make sure he’s honored, buried in a sacred place, rewarded. You will not be remembered as an inmate in a prison. You will be remembered as a hero in Russia. “
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And other people sign up? For example, do other people in prisons buy what Prigozhin sells?
Ouais. Je means that, as far as we know, many of those inmates have accepted Prigozhin for this treatment. The challenge is that they are not the most reliable soldiers.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
I met one of the incarcerated named Yevgeny Nuzhin
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
This boy is 55 years old. He is serving a sentence for murder. He has been in prison for more than 20 years.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And Prigozhin arrives at his in August. He is on the ground in Ukraine in September.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And his job, he says, is necessarily to be in a trench and, at nightfall, go to the battlefield and retrieve the bodies of dead Wagnerian soldiers.
God.
That’s their job, and it gives you a sense of the carnage that’s happening there. But he doesn’t stay. He doesn’t stay.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
His plan from the beginning, he said, to settle for the deal and escape. And that’s precisely what he did.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
On his best day at the front, he passed by to pass out and make his paintings collecting bodies, but instead wandered along the lines and encountered an organization of very surprised Ukrainian infantrymen who. . .
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
– knocked him out and tied him up. And when he woke up, he stopped in Ukraine, that’s where I met him in October.
And what did he do to you?
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
He was proud of what he had done.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And he said, what has Putin done well since coming to power?Did he do well?
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
He said he thought the war would be Putin’s grave.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And a lot of Wagnerian infantrymen were killed. The vast majority, according to the intelligence of the Ukrainian army, are the detainees who have just been sent to the front, so we can judge, to serve as cannon fodder, to shoot the bullets of the Ukrainian forces and exhaust them.
IT IS OK. So, at the end of the day, the Wagner Group is not reversing the war. And at the same time, it’s terrible carnage in the position those guys end up in. So you can believe why someone like Yevgeny, the guy you talked to. a, made the decision to flee. Right? Mike, what happened to Yevgeny?
Well, when Yevgeny accepted this deal, Pripasszhin issued a warning. He said that any of those detainees who made the decision to move to Ukraine and fight for Russia in Ukraine, if it was found that they had defected, that they were surrendering. , who had fled the battlefield, would have serious consequences. He said in one of his videos that they would be shot. And after we spoke, Yevgeny discovered that it was in the hands of Wagner’s fighters.
Oh, dear. Exchanged?
Yes. As a result of a prisoner exchange. The Ukrainians gave it back to the Russians, and the next time I saw it in a video it gave the impression of being online. And Yevgeny’s head was stuck to a block, and on top of him was this camouflaged guy holding a mace. And in this video, Yevgeny speaks. He said he woke up in a basement and said he was going to be tried.
And when he says that, the guy with the hammer knocks him down and crushes his skull.
My God, Mike. Es like an ISIS beheading video.
It’s very similar to that, and if there was any doubt about how Prigozhin felt about it, he issued an endorsement of Yevgeny’s murder. He said that Yevgeny had betrayed his people, betrayed his comrades, consciously betrayed them. He planned his escape. Nuzhin is a traitor. It was issued some time after the execution.
And what I think happens here is that it’s kind of like a test balloon. Russia is in danger in Ukraine and wants solutions. And Prigozhin was led to find solutions. And he discovered this over-solution, this point of terror, to maintain control and maintain order in the ranks of Russian foot soldiers in Ukraine. It is unclear whether this kind of remedy will be extended to the rest of the Russian military, but it is the Kremlin. who is suffering to find answers on how to correct shipping in Ukraine and start making a profit.
[MUSIC IN PROGRESS]
‘Ll.
So, Mike, you took us in early fall. The Russian military has not met its own expectations. They fight with their Plan B and Plan C, wasting tons of their own men and starting to use brutal tactics to keep them in line. . And we know that until September, Putin announces a compulsory military service to have even more men. So what is going on internally in the Russian military right now?What effect does this have?
Well, the only main effect it has is that you need about 250,300,000 Russian men who, for the first five or six months of this war, saw it from afar, essentially watching it on their couch, watching it on Russian television, and spear took them to the front with a little education and very little sense of what they were meant to do. I was able to touch several infantrymen of the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, which is a unit founded in the Russian Far East. as far from Ukraine as you can imagine and still be in Russia. I spoke to them weeks after they were written and they described a scene of utter horror and chaos.
They groped onto the battlefield through those crater farms in those fields without maps, medical kits, or functional walkie-talkies, without any ability to talk to each other. A platoon doctor, a former bartender who had never gained medical training.
Oh.
And they ordered them to go ahead, to cross those fields with those Kalashnikov rifles that were made in the 1960s and almost nothing to eat. one-year recruits. They had no artillery. They had no air cover. They had very little ammunition.
But when they describe this, they say they weren’t afraid of any of those situations at first because their commanders promised them they would never see a fight. And it wasn’t until Ukrainian shells began crashing into their heads and shattering their comrades. in pieces that they learned had been deceived. And I talked to the members of a platoon. They entered with 60 men on the march. In a single day, 40 of them were killed.
God.
On a four-hour single stretch in Ukraine.
Wow. I mean, it’s cannon fodder.
Exactly.
I mean, it’s as if the Russian army isn’t informed at all. It’s just one mistake after another, and you’d think they’d recalibrate at some point, but they’re not. For example, they continue to throw bodies into this challenge and have them destroyed.
And that’s the challenge we met at the very beginning of the war, Y. These challenges persisted everywhere. And the foot soldiers I spoke to about the 155th understood it intrinsically. I spoke to one of the survivors, a Russian soldier named Alexander, as he was recovering in an army hospital in southern Russia. Battlefield, all he saw were legs, guts, and flesh. He said, I know it sounds terrible, but it can’t be described any other way. People have become hamburgers.
Dieu. Et Mike, how did you feel after all this?For example, you would speak to him from an army hospital after, of course, that he had already been wounded and had returned to Russia. For example, was he angry with the Russians. army, as well as with their commanders?
I mean, what made him the most angry were the lies. He was lied to through the Russian media, who told him from his couch in Russia’s Far East as he watched this war in its first months that everything was going according to plan, that everything was going well. They lied to him through his commanders, who said he would only fill one role and would not be at the front. These were other people who were surely not prepared to be sent to war, and yet they were sent to war anyway.
Alexander told me that he recruited in September with 3 of his close friends from the formative years. He is in hospital following a severe concussion caused by the bombing of his unit. Another of 4 friends who suffered similar injuries in the hospital with a concussion. his legs. And the 4th is missing.
Oh, it’s devastating. And only a general for human life.
But what he told me is that he completely expects to be discharged from the hospital, as his injuries are minor, and when he does, he will return to Ukraine and do so of his own free will.
Oh really?
It would possibly oppose the way war is fought, but it is not opposed to war.
But why would I come back, Mike, after all this?The loss of his friends, what he saw, why?
What I discovered most desirable about Alexander is that he understood that Russian infantrymen on the ground were being treated. He understood that the war is going badly despite what Russian propaganda tells him. But his bottom line is that he can’t do anything about it. which is their destiny in life. It’s that kind of ambivalent fatalism you encounter when you communicate with a lot of those foot soldiers.
He told me in our conversation, that’s how we were raised. We grew up in our country understanding that it doesn’t matter how our country treats us. Maybe it’s bad. Maybe that’s good. Possibly there will be things we don’t like about our government. But he added that when a scenario like this presents itself, we get up and leave.
This is the eternity of Russia.
And I think it shows that this war can continue thanks to other people like Alexander, who suffer the most and are aware that they are being treated like garbage. If those other people are in a position to stand up and return to Ukraine and continue. This war, who happens to end it?
No matter how many tactical mistakes the Russian military makes, how trustworthy, how resilient it is to receiving informed lessons, despite all this, the Kremlin knows that it can count on other people who are content to settle for things. It can go a long time.
Exactly.
Mike, thank you
My pleasure.
‘Ll.
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Madam Secretary, on behalf of the House Republican Conference, I rise to nominate California President Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House to lead the new Republican majority in the United States.
In dramatic opposition to their own leader, an organization of far-right Republicans rejected Representative Kevin McCarthy as the next speaker of the House in another 3 rounds of voting, denying him the 218 votes he needed.
No user won the majority of the total number of votes through the last name. No speakers were elected.
It was a humiliating setback for McCarthy, who struggled to convince right-wing lawmakers to accept him as true. McCarthy can only lose the votes of 4 fellow Republicans. Instead, he lost as much as 20. After the third vote, the House adjourned without opting for a leader, something that had not happened in nearly a hundred years.
In accordance with the procedure followed by the House in 1923, the Secretary ordered the Secretary-Reader to proceed with a new appeal.
According to House regulations, voting for the speaker will resume later in the day and continue until a speaker is elected. an NFL primetime game. In a big move, the NFL suspended play after Hamlin collapsed on the field. It was the latest incident to raise questions about the protection of players in professional football.
Today’s episode produced by Clare Toeniskoetter and Luke Vander Ploeg. Edited by Marc Georges and Lisa Chow, with assistance from Paige Cowett, it comprises Anastasia Vorozhtsov’s translations of Rowan Niemisto’s original music and designed by Chris Wood. Our main theme is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.
That’s it for The Quotidien. Je am Sabrina Tavernise.
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Organized by Sabrina Tavernise
Produced by Clare Toeniskoetter and Luke Vander Ploeg
Edited by Marc Georges and Lisa Chow
With Paige Cowet
Original music by Rowan Niemisto
Designed by Chris Wood
This episode is obscene language and descriptions of violence.
When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, many believed that the country’s army would temporarily overwhelm Ukrainian forces. Instead, the Russian military explained the war.
Today, we hear from Russian infantrymen and explore why a military superpower continues to make the same mistakes and why, despite everything, its infantrymen continue to fight.
Michael Schwirtz, investigative reporter for The New York Times.
Secret war plans, intercepted communications and interviews with Russian foot soldiers about how a “walk in the park” has turned into a crisis for Russia.
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Michael Schwirtz contributed to the report.
The Daily is directed by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, MJDavis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba IttoopArray Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Sofia Milan, Ben Calhoun and Susan Lee.
Our theme song is through Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk from Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Desiree Ibekwe, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis. Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello and Nell Gallogly.
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