Russian defector: “Significant casualties in the army, morale down”
A low morale army suffering heavy casualties, weighed down by the discontent of underpaid soldiers and undermined by the troops’ distrust of the authorities: said Lieutenant Dmitry Mishov, a 26-year-old Russian airman who managed to escape, in an exclusive interview with the BBC in Lithuania, where he applied for political asylum. Dmitri was a combat helicopter navigator based in the Pskov region of northwestern Russia: when Moscow began preparing the plane for combat, it sensed that this was not an exercise but a war. In January 2022, he tried to leave the Air Force, but his papers were still pending when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. He was then sent to Belarus and returned to his homeland two months later: last January he was supposed to go to Ukraine on a “mission”, and that’s when he decided to go: first with a fake suicide attempt in hopes of a leave of absence health, then with escape. The mood in the army is mixed, he says: some support the war, others are strictly against it. Few believe they are fighting to protect Russia from a real threat, he insists, saying this has long been the official narrative. Meaning: Moscow was forced to resort to a “special military operation” to prevent an attack on Russia. There is widespread dissatisfaction with low salaries among the military. According to Dmitry, experienced Air Force officers are still being paid their pre-war contract salary, which can be as high as 90,000 rubles (about 1,000 euros), while new recruits are lured into the army with 204,000 rubles a month. And the morale of the soldiers also suffers from Moscow’s lies. “In the military, nobody believes the authorities. You can see what’s really happening. They are not civilians in front of the TV. The military doesn’t believe the official reports because they simply aren’t true,” he continues. “No one believes the official reports of successes or small losses at the front,” he explains, describing the losses suffered by military aviation as “extremely high”.