Russian commanders have been removed from their positions for lying to their superiors about advances made on the battlefield, it has been reported.
Pro-Moscow military bloggers have reacted angrily to officers within Russia’s Third Combined Arms Army making inaccurate reports about gains near the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
While Russian state media’s description of the war started by Vladimir Putin is tightly controlled by the government, pro-war milbloggers on Telegram give a far less varnished view of how Moscow is conducting the war, often revealing shortcomings regarding tactics and command.
In a post headlined “a whirlwind of lies coming from Siversk,” referring to a city in Donetsk oblast, the Telegram channel Rybar said brigade and battalion commanders had been arrested, removed or demoted for describing “the fake capture of settlements.”
The post said that when commanders’ superiors went to visit areas that were claimed to have been “liberated” by Russian forces, “the scale of the deception was revealed.”
“The lies were not only in the reports,” added the post, which outlined how correspondents had been invited to interview fighters “who boasted of the media capture of non-existent villages” to corroborate the false claims.
The Telegram channel Osetin said Russia’s sixth and 123rd brigades were also being investigated and that “the entire command staff had been changed after the lies were uncovered.” The post on Saturday described the punishment as “a good result,” adding, “I hope that new people will not make the same mistakes.”
It also said commanders had ordered “incomprehensible assaults” near Bilohorivka, a settlement that lies around 10 miles east of Siversk, in the neighboring Luhansk region.
The OK SPN channel said that a culture of “lies has absorbed the command of units of the 3rd Combined Arms Army, which has caused sad consequences,” in which special forces (Spetsnaz) formations have been used to plug gaps and compensate for poor command decisions, which led to unnecessary losses.
The Institute for the Study of War said on Saturday that Russian command failures and the exaggeration of battlefield successes near Bilohorivka have formed “a point of neuralgia for the Russian milblogger community”, especially as Moscow suffered huge losses in personnel and equipment in trying to take the settlement.
The Washington, D.C., think tank said that, while the Kremlin has previously been sensitive to milbloggers’ criticism of how it is fighting the war, it was unclear that the latest arrests were in response to their outcry.
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