Two Russian soldiers correctly predicted their deaths after being ordered on a suicide mission as punishment for arguing with their commander.
The middle-aged drone operators, who had been ordered to storm Ukrainian positions near Pokrovsk, also warned others against joining the “callous” Russian army in a posthumously published video.
“I’m leaving for an attack. If I come back fine, if I don’t then we’ll show you and explain to you [the reality],” Dmitry Lysakovsky, an experienced drone operator said.
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His comments were made in the farewell footage that first appeared on Friday. He is said to have then gone missing during an attack on the village of Lysivka, near one of the most active parts of the eastern front line.
“Please, don’t serve in the ministry of defence… Your task is to die here so that the regiment commander, reporting to higher-ups, looks good. You are his personal serfs.”
The soldiers also accused their commander of dealing in drugs, faking battlefield successes, disbanding a high-performing drone unit out of spite and feeding information to a Ukrainian military intelligence spy network.
The video, widely circulated on the Telegram social messaging app, has angered the Russian ministry of defence, which is trying to boost army recruitment.
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In response, Andrei Belousov, the Russian defence minister, ordered General Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian military, to personally investigate the video and the death of the two soldiers.
Z-bloggers, Russian pro-war social media influencers, have also used the death of the two soldiers to criticise the Russian ministry of defence.
Warrior Kitten, which has around 408,000 subscribers, said that the two men were veteran soldiers who had been ordered to their deaths by “traitors and swindlers”.
“This is how our competent and compassionate army sends people to slaughter,” the blogger said.
“The men knew and felt that they were going to die, and in this address, they reported on the facts of their internal betrayal.”