The Daily - Inside Russia’s Military Catastrophe

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

This episode contains strong language and descriptions of violence.When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, many believed the country’s army would quickly crush the Ukrainian forces. Instead, Russian military failures have defined the war.Today, we hear from Russian soldiers, and explore why a military superpower keeps making the same mistakes and why, despite it all, its soldiers keep going back to fight.Guest: Michael Schwirtz, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: Secret battle plans, intercepted communications and interviews with Russian soldiers explain how a “walk in the park” became a catastrophe for Russia.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Russia's military failures have defined its war against Ukraine and were exemplified by a major attack this week in which dozens of Russian soldiers were killed as they slept in their barracks. killed as they slept in their barracks. Today, my colleague Michael Schwartz interviews Russian soldiers and reveals new details about how this military superpower keeps making the same mistakes and why, despite all of that, its soldiers keep going back to fight. It's Wednesday, January 4th. So, Mike, you have been investigating this question I think a lot of us have had, those of us who've been paying attention to the war in Ukraine. And that is this, that both Russia, and I think to a certain extent, the world, thought that Russia would just roll in and defeat the Ukrainians outright, right? Like they'd roll into the Capitol, take it in three

days, the war would be over. But that obviously didn't happen, like not even close. So you and our colleagues decided to take a deep look into how the Russian forces failed so badly. So tell me what you guys did. What my colleagues and I decided to do is really drill down into the question of why. Why is it that this military that the entire world thought was advanced, was huge, was deadly, was menacing, how were they unable to carry out the war plans that everybody envisioned, that the Russians envisioned, that the West envisioned. And one of the important questions I wanted to answer was how the Russians themselves viewed this war, what they thought of what they were doing, and what they thought of their success, how they evaluated their performance.

And so we really worked hard to try and find copies of Russian correspondence, diaries, call logs, battle plans. And we went around and interviewed as many Russian soldiers as we could find as well. This was in POW camps. This was by phone, Russians that we could connect to who had been on the battlefield who had returned to Russia. So tell me what you guys found. Where should we start? Oh, we can start at the beginning.

And the thing that everybody needs to understand is just how overconfident the Russians were. They planned to take Ukraine and topple the government in Kiev, the capital. Troops were going to race in from three directions, seize the government, and that would be the end of the war. But when we started speaking to Russian soldiers, we realized that they didn't have any idea what

that plan was. Many of them didn't find out about it until the hours before the war began. I spoke to a corporal named Nikita Chibrin. He's a 27-year-old soldier in a motorized infantry brigade. And he said he spent a month before the war in Belarus, which is the country north of Ukraine, on what he and his fellow soldiers were told was a training exercise, but what he described as more like camping. There was no military exercises involved. And on February 23rd, the day before the invasion was announced,

he and his unit were in their camp celebrating Defender of the Fatherland holiday, which is a Russian national holiday for service members. And they were snacking on candy for the occasion when their commander approached. And the commander told them only, and I'm quoting, tomorrow you are going to Ukraine to fuck up some shit. And beyond that, they were given no further orders. Another soldier that we interviewed, who was stationed in Belarus, said he found out he was going to war only an hour before his unit began to march. And the only order that he was given was that he was supposed to just drive straight and follow the vehicle in front of him, with no explanation beyond that.

God, it's amazing. It's amazing that they knew so little and were so ill-prepared. And to your point, they were just so overconfident. They thought it would be a cakewalk. But instead of the war being over quickly, it just started to drag on. Right. And this was devastating, particularly for the Russian troops on the ground in that first for the Russian troops on the ground in that first push into Ukraine. Very quickly, they came under incredibly heavy fire from Ukrainian troops that were in smaller units, in more nimble units. And not only are a lot of soldiers dying, but a lot of Russia's most elite troops. These are the special forces units. These are the airborne units. And hundreds

and hundreds were killed. Okay, so the Russians right out of the gate lost a lot of their highly trained guys. And that was a huge problem for them. So how did they deal with it? Like, how did the Russian military see a way out of that fix they were in? Well, the first thing they did is pull all of their troops out of northern Ukraine and away from Kiev. The plan was to reconsolidate them in the east and the south and reconstitute some of these units that had been decimated. But what they really needed was more guys. So the Kremlin and the military started trying to find ways

to bulk up their forces with more men. One of the things they did was turn to a mercenary group called Wagner that had experience all over the Middle East and Africa. And these are highly trained soldiers. So, in other words, because Russia unexpectedly loses all of their experienced guys, in a sort of desperate move, they turn to this group of hired guns, the Wagner Group.

Remind us who they are. Right. This is a group that got started coming on a decade ago, and it has the appearance of a military contractor. It was started by this man by the name of Yevgeny Prigozhin. This is a businessman who has catered Kremlin events in the past,

and so he has a connection to Vladimir Putin. A caterer. He's a caterer and a businessman. He has had very large contracts catering the military, catering Russian schools, and he has been photographed serving Vladimir Putin food at different state functions. And Mike, why would a caterer run a militia? That's one of the mysteries of the Wagner Group, how he got into running a militia. It is only in the last few months that Prigozhin has taken responsibility for founding the Wagner Group.

In the past, he's denied even its existence and sued journalists who have alleged that he is behind it. Oh, interesting. So it was like a secret thing. It was a secret thing, but a very, very open secret. These guys have been operating all over the world. They've been operating in Libya and Syria. And basically what this is, it's a deniable arm of the Russian military. It operates semi-autonomously. As far as we know, based on our reporting, they make decisions on their own, but they are definitely a tool in the Kremlin's arsenal. They are pursuing the Kremlin's geopolitical goals,

only they're deniable. So if Wagner is operating somewhere in Syria, gets into a little bit of trouble because of human rights violations, this has happened, in fact. The Kremlin can say they know nothing about it. They don't know who these people are. Syria gets into a little bit of trouble because of human rights violations. This has happened, in fact. The Kremlin can say they know nothing about it. They don't know who these people are.

Right. Interesting. But the point is that these guys have real military experience. And that's not something you can say for the bulk of the Russian military. The Russian military hasn't fought a war like this in decades. It looks like World War I, they're fighting over miles of territory, trench warfare, jockeying for position. Nobody has this kind of experience. Nobody but these Wagner troops. Okay, so they go to this Wagner group, this catering guy, for experienced men mainly. But what happens then? Like, what does he do? Well, Prigozhin's role is that he's bringing in these experienced guys, but Russia also needs bodies. And Prigozhin comes up with what you might call a creative solution. He starts recruiting

men from prisons to send to the front lines. Wow. So that's a step. Right. And then these videos start appearing of him going to these prisons and recruiting prisoners. And he gives them this patriotic pitch. He's like, look, you guys screwed up. You're in here. You're a drain on the state.

How's about you turn your life around and do something for the good of the country? If you survive, we will pardon you. You'll get a clean slate. You'll be able to go back to your life and live a normal life back home if you survive. If you don't survive, we're going to make sure that you're honored, that you're going to be buried in a hallowed place, that you're going to be awarded. You're not going to be remembered as an inmate in a prison.

You're going to be remembered as a hero to Russia. And do people sign up? Like, are people in prisons buying what Prigozhin is selling? Yeah. I mean, as far as we know, that hundreds of these inmates have taken Prigozhin up on this deal. The problem is, is they're not always the most reliable soldiers. I met with one of these prisoner soldiers by the name of Yevgeny Nuzhin. This guy is 55 years old. He's doing time for murder. He's been in prison for more than 20 years. And Prigozhin comes to his prison in August.

He's on the ground in Ukraine by September. And his job, he says, basically is to sit in a trench and by nightfall go out into the field of battle and collect the bodies of dead Wagner soldiers. God. This is his job. And it gives you a sense of the carnage that's happening out there. But he doesn't stay. He doesn't stay.

Can you tell us how you got here? I wanted to get here myself. I gave up. His plan all along, he said, was to take this deal and escape. And that's just what he did. He left the unloading and the machine gun at the position. On his second day at the front, he was going to go out and do his job of collecting bodies, but instead he wandered over the lines and came upon a very startled group of Ukrainian soldiers

who knocked him unconscious and tied him up. And when he woke up, he was in Ukrainian custody, which is where I met him in October. And what did he tell you? Because I wanted it. He was proud of what he had done.

And he told me that — He was proud of what he had done. — And he told me that, what good has Putin done in the time that he's been in power? Has he done anything good? — He said he thinks that the war was going to be Putin's grave. — And, you know, hundreds of Wagner troops have been killed. The vast majority, according to Ukraine's military intelligence, are these inmates who are simply sent to the front lines, as best we can tell, to serve as counter-fodder, to draw the bullets of Ukrainian forces and wear them down. Okay, so at the end of the day, the Wagner Group is not turning the war around. And at the same time, it's horrible carnage at the place where these guys are ending up. So you kind of can

imagine why someone like Yevgeny, the guy you talked to, decided to flee, right? So Mike, what happened to Yevgeny? Well, when Yevgeny took this deal, Prigozhin issued a warning. He said that any of these inmates who decided to go along to Ukraine and fight for Russia and Ukraine, if it were found out that they deserted, that they turned themselves in, that they ran from the battlefield, there would be severe consequences. He said in one of his videos that they would themselves in, that they ran from the battlefield, there would be severe consequences. He said in one of his videos that they would be shot. And somehow, after we spoke, Yevgeny ended up back into the hands of Wagner fighters.

Oh, wow. He was traded? Yes, it was as a result of a prisoner swap. The Ukrainians gave him back to the Russians. And the next time I saw him was in a video that appeared online. And Yevgeny's head was taped to a block. And standing over him was this man in camouflage holding a sledgehammer. And in this video, Yevgeny speaks. He said he woke up in a basement and was told that he was going to be judged.

He said he woke up in a basement and was told that he was going to be judged. And when he says that, the man with the sledgehammer swings it down and crushes his skull. Oh my God, Mike. It's like an ISIS beheading video. It's very similar to that. And if there was any doubt about how Prigozhin felt about it, he released a statement endorsing Yevgeny's murder. He said, Yevgeny betrayed his people,

betrayed his comrades, betrayed them consciously. He planned his escape. Nuzhin is a traitor. That's a statement that he put out shortly after the execution was carried out. And what I think is happening here is that this is something like a trial balloon.

Russia is in danger in Ukraine, and it needs solutions. And Prigozhin has been prodded to find solutions, and he's come up with this extreme solution. This level of terror of keeping control and keeping order among the ranks of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. It's not clear whether this type of treatment will be expanded to the rest of the Russian military,

but this is the Kremlin struggling to come up with answers for how to right the ship in Ukraine and start making some gains. We'll be right back. So, Mike, you've brought us to early fall. The Russian military's failed to live up to their own expectations over and over. They're casting about with their Plan Bs and Plan Cs, losing tons of their own men, and beginning to use brutal tactics to keep them in line. And we know that by September, Putin announces a draft to get even more men. So what happens inside the Russian military at this point?

What effect does that have? Well, the one major effect that it has is that it takes about 250,000, 300,000 Russian men who, for the first five, six months of this war, had been watching it from the sidelines, essentially watching it on their couch, watching it on Russian television, and throws them onto the front lines with barely any training and really little sense of what they were supposed to be doing. I was able to contact was able to contact several troops from Russia's 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, which is a unit based in Russia's far, far east, so about as far from Ukraine as you can possibly get and still be

in Russia. I spoke to them weeks after they had been drafted, and they described a scene of utter horror and chaos. They entered the battlefield bumbling through these cratered farms in these fields with no maps, no working medical kits or walkie-talkies, no ability to communicate with one another. One platoon medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training. And they were ordered forward going through these fields with these Kalashnikov rifles that were made in the 1960s and virtually nothing to eat. Some of them had never fired a gun before, and those that had hadn't done so since they were 18-year-old conscripts. They had no artillery. They had no air cover. They had very little ammunition. But when they are describing this, they said they weren't

frightened by any of these conditions initially because they were promised by their commanders that they'd never seek combat. And it was only when Ukrainian shells began crashing on their heads and ripping their comrades to pieces did they realize that they had been duped. And I spoke to members of a single platoon. They went in with 60 men on a march in a single day. 40 of them were killed. God. In a single four-hour stretch in eastern Ukraine. Wow. I mean, that is truly cannon fodder. Exactly. I mean, it's like the Russian military is not learning at all. Like, it's just failure after failure. And you'd think at some point they'd recalibrate, but they aren't. Like,

they just keep going with this throw bodies at this problem and have them destroyed. And that's the problem that we identified at the very beginning of the war, and these problems have persisted throughout. And the soldiers that I talked to from the 155th, they understood that intrinsically. I spoke to one of the survivors, a Russian soldier named Alexander, as he recovered in a military hospital in the south of Russia. And what he said is, you know, when he looked out over the battlefield, all he saw were legs and guts and meat. He said, I know it sounds terrible, but you can't describe it any other way. People were turned into hamburger. God. And Mike, what was his feeling after all of this? Like, you were talking to him

from a military hospital after, of course, he'd already been wounded and made it back to Russia. Like, was he angry at the Russian military? Like, at his commanders? I mean, the thing that enraged him most were the lies. He was lied to by the Russian media, which told him from his couch in far eastern Russia when he was watching this war in its early months that everything was going according to plan, that everything is going well. He was lied to by his commanders who said that he was only going to be involved in a support role and wouldn't be on the front lines. These were people who were utterly unequipped to be sent into war, and yet they were sent into war anyway. Alexander told me that he was drafted in September

along with three of his close childhood friends. He was in the hospital from a severe concussion from the shelling that his unit had come under. Another one of these four friends had suffered similar injuries, was in the hospital for a concussion. One lost both legs, and the fourth is missing. Oh, that is devastating. And just complete disregard for human life. Right. But what he told me is that he fully expects to be discharged from the hospital, given that his injuries are light, and that when he does, he'll be going back to Ukraine, and that he's going to be doing so willingly. Really?

He may be opposed to how the war is being conducted, but he's not opposed to the war. But why would he go back, Mike, after all of this? The loss of his friends, what he saw, like, why? You know, the thing that I found most fascinating about Alexander is he understood that the Russian soldiers on the ground are being treated like crap. He understood that the war is going poorly despite what the Russian propaganda is telling him. But his ultimate conclusion is that there's nothing he can do about it. You know, that this is his lot in life. It's this sort of ambivalent fatalism that you meet when you talk to a lot of these soldiers.

He told me in our conversation, this is how we were raised. We grew up in our country understanding that it doesn't matter how our country treats us. Maybe this is bad. Maybe this is good. Maybe there are things that we do not like about our government. But he added, when a situation like this arises, we get up and go. It is the eternal mystery of Russia. And I think it really shows that, you know, this war can continue on.

Because if people like Alexander, who are suffering the most of it, and who are aware that they're just treated like trash, if these people are willing to get up and go back to Ukraine and continue this war, who's going to put a stop to it? Yeah. No matter how many tactical errors the Russian military makes, how overconfident, how resistant to learning lessons, despite all of that, the Kremlin knows it can count on people just going along with things. And that means this could go on for a long, long time. Exactly. Mike, thank you.

My pleasure. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. We'll be right back. In a dramatic revolt against their own leader, a group of hard-right Republicans rejected Representative Kevin McCarthy as the next Speaker of the House in three different rounds of voting, denying him the 218 votes that he needed. No persons have received a majority of the whole number of votes cast by surname. A speaker has not been elected. It was a humiliating setback for McCarthy, who has struggled to persuade right-wing lawmakers to trust him. McCarthy could only afford to lose the votes of four Republican colleagues. Instead, he lost as many as 20. After the third round of voting, the House adjourned without having chosen a leader, something that has not happened in nearly 100 years. Following the procedure used by the House adjourned without having chosen a leader, something that has not happened in nearly 100 years. Following the procedure used by the House in 1923, the clerk is prepared to direct

the reading clerk to call a roll anew. Under House rules, voting for speaker will resume later today and will continue until a speaker is elected. And Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills defensive back, remained in critical condition on Tuesday after he went into cardiac arrest following a routine tackle during a primetime NFL game. In a highly unusual decision, the NFL suspended the game after Hamlin collapsed on the field. It was the latest incident to raise questions about player safety in professional football. Today's episode was produced by Claire Tannisketter and Luke van der Ploeg. It was edited by Mark George and Lisa Chow, with help from Paige Cowett. Contains translations by Anastasia Varashova.

Original music by Rowan Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. We'll see you tomorrow.