Some Russian troops who have invaded Ukraine are so unhappy with their mission that they have begun sabotaging their own vehicles and surrendering en masse, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
“Obviously not all of them were fully trained and prepared or even knew they would be sent into combat operation,” a senior Defense Ministry official told reporters at a briefing.
“We ourselves have caught indications that morale in some of these units is declining.”
The acts of vandalism include drilling gas tanks on vehicles, presumably so that soldiers can avoid being transported in battle, the official said.
Whole units of Russian soldiers – many of them young conscripts with a poor taste for war – have even laid down their arms and given up instead of fighting Ukraine’s highly motivated defenders, the official said.
Ukraine’s security service has released online videos alleging that Russian prisoners of war say they believe they were simply participating in military exercises before being part of the invasion force.
On Monday, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations also read aloud desperate, recent text messages from an unidentified Russian soldier to his mother, minutes before he was killed in battle.
“We were told that they would meet us and they fell under our armored vehicles, threw themselves under the wheels and did not allow us to pass,” the doomed soldier wrote.
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“They call us fascists. Mom, it’s so hard. “
About 80 percent of Russia’s 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders have crossed into the former Soviet republic since the invasion began on Thursday, a defense official said.
But the Russian army has covered much less territory than planned and is now hampered by a shortage of supplies, and the “comprehensive movement” to the capital Kyiv – which includes a massive 40-mile military convoy – “is stagnant at this point,” the official said. .
“In many cases, what we see are columns that are literally without gas,” the official said. “Now they are running out of food for their troops.”
In addition to fierce resistance and problems with “maintenance and logistics”, Russia has not yet gained control of the skies over Ukraine, the official said.
The unexpected situation has apparently forced Russian commanders to “regroup and rethink and try to adapt to the challenges they have had,” the official said, potentially through a prolonged siege of Kyiv.
With postal wires