The game is over! You are all military.
There are no material supplies!
Nothing at all!
What exactly is the thinking inside Russia
as dissent and defeats mount?
Putin’s army, once feared, now in disarray.
In Siberia, another man shot a recruitment officer point blank.
They recruit, actually, everybody—
old people, sick people,
people without any military experience.
There was no fucking medical commission at all!
There are mentally unstable people here.
He thinks that he can win the war
by just throwing more grinder meat into the front lines.
That’s it ... We’re fucked ...
We found some posts by newly recruited soldiers.
We depart to Kherson on the 29th [of September].
We won’t be trained before going to warzone.
They can face a prosecution
in case they will be catched with a smartphone.
But at the same time, there is much less discipline.
So they are using their smartphones more often.
Their motivation is exactly the same as ours—
to share the brightest moments of their life.
And a lot of them trying to complain.
We were warned that the conditions will be even worse.
The fuck knows what we’re gonna do here.
[SUPER_USERS]
[TRACKING DOWN RUSSIAN TROOPS]
My name is Mark Krutov,
and I’m an investigative journalist
currently covering the Russian-Ukrainian war.
So, open-source intelligence
is the source which everyone can find.
You find out not only the soldier.
You’re starting to investigate who is he, where did he came from,
what is his unit, where does he serve.
We can retrieve a lot of information about how the war is going.
We found one photo
posted by a soldier from so-called Donetsk People’s Republic.
He’s sitting on his BM-22 Grad rocket system,
and he forgot to turn off the geolocation.
So we found out his position on the map.
It's a position in the middle of the field near Kherson region.
And by searching nearby images,
we found pictures of other Russian soldiers who posted from that area.
For example, we found the soldier’s photo in the office,
and it appeared to be the office of the local agricultural company.
Russia seized a lot of Ukrainian agricultural assets.
These new satellite images
show what appear to be the ramping up of theft by Russia
of Ukrainian grain.
They do not only steal the grain and export it to other countries,
but they also put their hands on the infrastructure of facilities.
We even found a soldier
who post from the local family winery,
where it seems that he and his friends,
they have a firing position there.
Then we tried to look at other nearby photos.
We tried to contact the owner of the winery
to figure out if he knows that
Russia was using his winery and his hotel as a place to stay.
Russian president Vladimir Putin
just escalated his invasion of Ukraine,
calling up hundreds of thousands of reservists.
Why the fuck are you screaming like women?!
Shut the fuck up and behave properly!
Why are you all screaming?!
And why are you screaming?!
You probably have seen
a lot of videos from so-called gathering points.
It’s usually some large facilities, like sports halls,
where they gather all these mobilized [people]
before they will be brought to their units.
And conditions, how they keep them, is awful.
The bus is gone, nobody needs us.
We’re like cattle ...
There was a video of Russian mobilized people
who were just dropped off the bus in the middle of nowhere,
in the snow field.
And nobody waited for them.
They were freezing.
It was easy to geolocate because there was a comment section
on [Russian social media site] VKontakte under this video,
where people, mostly their relatives and wives, discussed the situation.
We were able to retrieve from there
an approximate area where it could have been filmed.
And after that, we started to look at satellite images,
started to search for possible military units
which are positioned nearby.
That’s how we were able to geolocate
the exact precise point where this video was filmed.
The problems with the tank, as I mentioned in the story,
are as tactical as they are technical.
We are able to figure out that
the losses of Russian equipment are huge,
and they cannot replace this equipment with a similar one.
They gave our tank guys this shit.
And we tracked how Russia moving tanks and howitzers
and other stuff to Ukraine.
And now we see that they’re unpacking old Soviet reserves,
and they’re bringing in tanks from 1960s, even.
From Cold War era, tanks.
Here we found a photo of a tank.
It was very easy to geolocate the photo because
there are a lot of landmarks on it.
This photo was taken on the railway station Millerovo.
This is a T-62M tank.
Very old tank. It’s actually crap.
Fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,
and now we’re learning that Vladimir Putin has 110,000 troops
amassed on the border.
Before the war, because we followed
the Russian military buildup in Ukraine very closely,
we knew for 99% already in December and November
that the war will break up.
We tracked the social media accounts of Russian soldiers
who were sent to Belarus.
Relatives of those soldiers start to discuss this on social media,
and they were told that they’re going to military exercises,
which is nothing new.
But when we started to follow them and reached out to them,
we discovered that a lot of people actually already know
from their commanders that they are going to Ukraine.
When we don't hide that we are journalists,
they are very often quite open and ready to speak
and tell you a lot of useful information, too.
They’re very frustrated, actually, with what’s happening.
The cheapest pads plus the cheapest tampons!
Insert them into the bullet wounds, and they will swell there!
Of course, your morale will be very low,
especially when you find yourself in the conditions
which are totally different from what you’ve been promised.
People are sick! Pneumonia, diseases, fever ...
We don’t have fucking tents. We sleep in the ground.
We’ve lived in awful conditions for a week!
Absolutely awful ...
It’s one thing when you are at your home city,
and if you say something, police will come after you.
But when you are sitting in the dirty trench,
and you can die at every next second,
maybe you’re just feeling a little bit more free [to post].