Sputnik
Russian and independent media have been reporting on Ukraine’s harsh recruitment tactics since early 2022, when President Zelensky announced general mobilization. Nearly two years on and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties later, legacy outlets are finally starting to catch up.
Retired CIA intelligence analyst and former State Department official Larry Johnson has compared Ukraine to the Titanic as Ukrainian officials attempt to escape the country to avoid certain death in the Zelensky regime’s meat grinder military campaign against Russia.
“The fact that the New York Times is now reporting this tells you how bad the situation is. They’ve realized that this party is over,” Johnson toldRedacted host Clayton Morris on Saturday, referencing an unusually frank expose by the newspaper characterizing Ukraine’s recruiters as “people snatchers” and detailing their harsh, corrupt, and illegal practices, from the confiscation of fighting age men’s passports to attempts to recruit the mentally disabled.
“It goes to part of another story that came out last week about members of the Rada – the legislature. They’re trying to get out of Ukraine. So to get out of Ukraine at the border you’ve got to show a passport. So no passport, no leav[ing],” Johnson said. “The fact that the Ukrainian legislators recognize that the end is near, which is why they’re trying to get out, it’s like that scene from the movie Titanic. The passengers are moving one direction, the rats are moving the opposite way. That’s what’s going on in Ukraine right now. The rats are heading for the lifeboats.”
The Ukrainian president’s office was forced to take measures earlier this year to block officials and lawmakers from making “business trips”abroad after a series of scandals involving vacations to luxury resorts while ordinary Ukrainians are mired in conflict and trying to survive. Earlier this month, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko complained that he too had been blocked from leaving the country on important “diplomatic work,” and called the decision to stop him “an anti-Ukrainian diversion” that would serve as a “blow to Ukraine’s defense capabilities.”
President Zelensky signed laws extending martial law and general mobilization last month, and in early December acknowledged a need for changes to the mobilization system to recruit even more conscripts. Last week, Ukraine’s military leadership proposed the mobilization of an additional 450,000-500,000 people, a task some US observers said may prove impossible as the country has already been drained of fighting-age men.
Larry Johnson echoed these sentiments. “A lot of these guys they’re grabbing are like my age, you know 68, 58, they’re not exactly in the prime of their life and able to take an 80 pound ruck on their back and run across 5-10 kilometers,” he said. On top of that, many of these people have no military experience, he said.
Pointing to the recent admission even by Ukraine’s notorious military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov that the current mobilization strategy is bound to fail, Johnson suggested “this lets you know that this thing’s not gonna drag on for two-three years as some have predicted. The end is nigh. I think they’ll be lucky to make it to summer.
The Kiev regime has been accused of using anti-retreat forces, which are military units tasked with preventing the withdrawal of their own troops. In mid-October, the governor of the Kherson region, Vladimir Saldo, said that Ukrainian barrier troops had opened fire on Ukrainian servicemen for refusing to cross the Dnepr River.
A Ukrainian barrier unit has shot at a group of retreating fighters from the Ukrainian Armed Forces, a source familiar with the situation told Sputnik, providing the agency with video footage taken by a drone confirming it.
The footage shows the Russian military assaulting a Ukrainian stronghold. As soon as two Russian fighters enter the trench, five Ukrainian soldiers start running out the other side of the trench towards rear positions. However, after the fleeing soldiers reached their trench, Ukrainian barrier troops positioned there started shooting at their fellow soldiers and then threw grenades at them.
One of the retreating Ukrainian soldiers tried to run further to the rear, but the fighters from the barrier unit spotted him and started shooting him in the back.
