Russian invasion plans, obtained by The New York Times, show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days.

Putin’s national security adviser boasting that Russia’s cutting-edge armed forces were strong enough to stand up even to the Americans. traveled to Moscow last year to warn against invading Ukraine, he found a supremely confident Kremlin, with Mr. Putin’s war was never supposed to be like this. “It’s the destruction of the Russian people by their own commanders.”Īt least your son didn’t drink himself to death, Putin told a bereaved mother. “This isn’t war,” Mikhail said, struggling to speak through heavy, liquid breaths. Only eight, he said, escaped serious injury. Of the 60 members of his platoon near the eastern Ukrainian town of Pavlivka that day in late October, about 40 were killed, said Mikhail, speaking by phone from a military hospital outside Moscow. Desperate to escape, he said, he crawled to a thicket of trees and tried to dig a ditch with his hands. Only when the shells began crashing around them, ripping their comrades to pieces, did they realize how badly they had been duped.įlung to the ground, a drafted Russian soldier named Mikhail recalled opening his eyes to a shock: the shredded bodies of his comrades littering the field. They would never see combat, their commanders had promised.

But it didn’t frighten them too much, they said. In interviews, members of the brigade said some of them had barely fired a gun before and described having almost no bullets anyway, let alone air cover or artillery.

Russia had been at war most of the year, yet its army seemed less prepared than ever. Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from half a century ago and virtually nothing to eat, they said. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. By Michael Schwirtz, Anton Troianovski, Yousur Al-Hlou, Masha Froliak, Adam Entous and Thomas Gibbons-Neffįumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said.

Big battle tanks hacked