A Russian Regiment Reportedly Lost 2,500 Draftees In Just Two Weeks Of Fighting

The Ukrainian army’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade is killing Russian draftees as fast as the Kremlin can shove the unhappy, unfit conscripts to the front near the Russian-occupied town of Svatove, 30 miles northwest of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

“We are just fucking meat, just fucking meat,” one draftee said in an intercepted phone call that popular social-media account @wartranslated helpfully interpreted for English speakers.

The call, reportedly with a member of the 362nd Motorized Rifle Regiment, paints a bleak picture for Russian draftees. The 362nd and a sister motorized regiment, the 346th, are under orders to hold the line around Svatove in order to slow, if not halt, the Ukrainian 92nd Mechanized Brigade’s march toward Severodonetsk, which Russian forces captured in July after months of hard fighting.

But the Russian regiments, partially staffed by some of the 300,000 men the Kremlin rounded up and forced into military service back in September, hopelessly are outmatched. “We have nothing!” the caller exclaimed. “How can we fight against mortars and tanks?”

The mismatch should come as no surprise. The 92nd Mechanized Brigade is a volunteer unit with well-maintained T-64 tanks and BTR fighting vehicles. Since the start of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine in February, the brigade has fought, and won, a series of battles in and around Kharkiv Oblast just north of Svatove. Now it’s got Severodonetsk in its sights.

The 362nd by contrast is as much a penal colony as it is a fighting formation. Its officers issue impossible orders and threaten the draftees with severe punishment if they retreat. After that, the officers disappear to the relative safety of the regiment’s rear area, leaving the untrained draftees to fight, without leadership, what arguably is the world’s most experienced mechanized brigade.

Posting to Svatove is a veritable death sentence for Russian conscripts. “Our battalion commander was bullshitting that we need to hold for two weeks” before replacement troops would arrive, the caller explained. “How the fuck can we hold here for two weeks?” The regiment lost 2,500 killed—half its manpower—in just the previous 12 days, the caller claimed.

Now just 100 survivors are trying to hold positions that 2,500 men failed to hold earlier this month, he said. When they complained, their officers labeled them deserters and threatened them with prison sentences. And when 300 wounded men crawled away from the line of contact, the regiment’s officers declared them deserters, too.

“Put us in prison,” some of the draftees told their officers, according to the caller. Better prison than the grave.

The kicker, for the beleaguered Russians, is that their regular forces aren’t faring much better around Svatove. Yes, the regiments of lightly armed draftees are getting massacred. But so too are units operating modern T-72B3 tanks. Ukrainian troops captured three intacted T-72B3s from a muddy field outside Svatove on or before Wednesday.