Shoot their own soldiers on command.
No military that believes in its mission or respects its men tells one unit to open fire on another because of a tactical error. No officer worth the insignia on his shoulders gives an order to shoot their own. Yet in Vladimir #Putin’s deformed war machine, this brand of savagery passes for command discipline. The intercepted call released by Ukrainian military intelligence reveals a Russian battalion commander ordering troops to shoot at fellow Russians in the 55th brigade—not enemies, not saboteurs, not traitors—just soldiers from a neighboring unit who made a mistake. The offense? They exposed a position. The punishment? Summary execution by comrades. This wasn’t battlefield fog or a misidentified target in the heat of battle. It was an unhinged directive snarled through the radio with profanity and venom, as if incompetence were best answered not with correction or coordination, but with a firing squad.
Russian military leadership does not suffer from a lack of communication—it suffers from a rot of command. What unfolds on these lines is not strategy, it’s sadism. They do not build cohesion or morale; they enforce obedience through terror, like a decaying Soviet caricature dragged into the 21st century wearing body armor held together with electrical tape. Russian commanders have treated their soldiers as expendable since the first day of the full-scale invasion. But now they’ve added a new clause: expendable to each other. The only thing more pathetic than being sent to die in a war built on lies is being ordered to shoot your own brothers in arms for revealing a position in an artillery meat grinder.
Russian troops, many of them conscripts barely trained and outfitted with rusted Soviet surplus, are not just facing Ukrainian drones and HIMARS batteries. They’re also dodging bullets from behind. The Kremlin’s war machine has achieved the rare distinction of simultaneously losing lives to enemy fire, fratricide, and its own bureaucratic psychosis. There is no honor in this army. There is no esprit de corps. There is only fear of the officer behind you, loathing for the soldier beside you, and a growing sense that the only safe direction to run is straight into captivity.
The internal decay runs deeper. Russian civilians in Bryansk and Belgorod oblasts—long shielded by distance and denial—are now openly cheering Ukrainian drone strikes against Moscow. The schism between the imperial center and its provincial underclass is widening. One woman in Bryansk, speaking candidly in an intercepted call, expressed what thousands surely feel: why should Muscovites live untouched, unaware, and unafraid while border regions absorb the consequences of the Kremlin’s imperial arrogance? The hunger for retribution is no longer just a Ukrainian instinct—it’s emerging in the voices of Russian citizens who see that Putin’s war doesn’t just kill abroad; it cannibalizes at home.
As the Russian army stumbles forward in eastern Ukraine, inching over fields soaked in the blood of men sent to die with a number stitched on their back and a stolen washing machine in their duffel, it leaves behind a legacy of fratricide, betrayal, and delusion. Putin’s military brass, bloated with medals and martinis in their gated dachas, has created an armed force so dysfunctional that the only command some soldiers fear more than the enemy’s is their own. When a commander’s answer to a botched maneuver is to order a firing squad on his own men, the only thing still “united” about this federation is the silence of those who know better but do nothing.
It is a military that no longer fights for anything—just at everything.
