This is Russian to the Core

In every recent war Russia has fought, it has punished those who end up behind the lines. Whether it’s sending former POWs to the Gulag or now bombing their people, for that matter, abandoning people is also a feature, not a bug. And I promise this piece is going to get quite dark. So, if you have issues with descriptions of torture, it might be best to avoid some of this because this piece will include that.

So let’s start with Kursk under Ukrainian control, this is the border town Ukraine first took by the way. The photos of the building when it was still intact:

Russian Armed Forces strike a boarding school in Sudzha where more than 90 Russian civilians were located

On the evening of February 1, the Russian Armed Forces struck a boarding school in Sudzha (Kursk region), where local residents, mainly elderly and bedridden patients, including those from surrounding villages, had been housed since August 2024.

According to the representative of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Command in Sudzha, Alexey Dmitrashkovsky, there were at least 94 civilians in the boarding school, the building was destroyed, and people are under the rubble.

The strike could have been carried out by a guided bomb or missile.

The Russian Armed Forces already shelled the boarding school in the fall, when the hit was nearby, killing one local resident. According to the Russian military, the Ukrainian Armed Forces (like the Russians) use buildings of schools, kindergartens, boarding schools, hospitals to accommodate personnel and the wounded, so such objects often become targets for strikes. In most cases, the victims are civilians. This time, the victims were Russians, who were hit by their own people.

The ruins of the boarding school are still smoking, the victims and the dead are still under the rubble, and the z-channels are already trying to turn the situation upside down. So “Two Majors” issued the following post: “The goal of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ missile strike on Sudzha was the accumulation of our civilian population, hiding from the war in one of the facilities. The goal of the bloody action was to accuse Russia of the so-called “attack on its own”, in order to knock down the growing wave of evidence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ atrocities in the Kursk region, which are being revealed as the villages are liberated. Our monitoring channels recorded the launch of missiles; Kyiv’s information operation has failed. However, civilians were killed.”

We will not provide a link to the “majors”, the channel is part of the Russian Defense Ministry network. By “fixing the missile launch”, the Defense Ministry truth-tellers meant a post in the Russian Telegram channel, which said that “4 missiles left Sumy Oblast”.

Russian propagandists are trying hard to blame the Ukrainian Armed Forces for the strike; Roman Alekhine has already joined the “majors” and the rest of the Defense Ministry media network is getting involved. The reason is clear: the death of several dozen Russian citizens from Russian shelling, and in Sudzha, where Ukrainian and Western journalists can easily come, is a scandal. Against the backdrop of protests by residents of the Kursk region, who have been left without housing and support from local and federal authorities, this news could destabilize the situation in the region.

Why are we sure that the Ukrainian Armed Forces would not attack Sudzha? Because Sudzha is the logistical center of the entire Ukrainian defense in the Kursk region. Because the Ukrainian Armed Forces, contrary to reports on Russian TV channels, do not bomb themselves. And also because the Russian army, having failed to take Sudzha in January, has been actively shelling settlements in the Kursk region occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces for the past week. Strikes at Kursk villages with Russian shells, missiles, and bombs have been carried out since August, but in recent days they have become perhaps the most intense since the beginning of the fighting in the region. The Ukrainian army has no shortage of targets in the Kursk region. In December and the first half of January alone, they successfully destroyed the headquarters and barracks of the Russian 76th Airborne Division and a number of other units in Lgov and Rylsk.

If there really are 94 people under the rubble, then this strike could become the most “effective” destruction of its own civilians by the Russian Armed Forces. @Volyamedia

As I said, this is peak Russian, and those of us who have studied Russia are not particularly surprised. Admittedly, though, I needed a better description before going there. The people at Volyemidia have provided a very good one.

This is what happened when Ukraine came into Russia. Realize, Russians did this in the Second World War as well, and later, many of those liberated ended up in the Gulag; I guess they did not have the patriotic sense to die:

They took away the cattle, but not the old people. About Russian civilians in Kursk region

Last fall we wrote about this on Patreon , now we’ll tell you about it here too.

Back in August 2024, Ukrainian second-tier units began checking the occupied villages in the Kursk region. Going around houses, taking a census of the remaining civilians, searching for the wounded, sick, Russian deserters, looters and soldiers who decided to “get lost”.

According to Ukrainian servicemen who took part in this operation, most of the remaining civilians are old people and children. August is the time of school holidays and many parents sent their children for the summer to their grandparents, where they were caught by the war.

In many villages, civilians who had managed to leave left their bedridden old people in closed houses. Fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers. The houses were closed.

“We were just shocked by this. We entered the house, and there the old man had been lying there for eight days, all smeared with his own excrements, his relatives had only left him water and some food, which had already run out by the time we arrived. The neighbors took the livestock for themselves, “so that it wouldn’t die,” and left the old people. In our three villages alone, where the cleanup was being carried out, there were eight such old people. All alive, they were all taken to Sudzha, but this is fucking bullshit, not the way to treat your own people,” one of the Ukrainian servicemen told us in the fall.

Since August, the elderly have been taken to nursing homes and hospitals in the Sumy region, but most of them remained in Sudzha, where they were gathered, including in the building of the boarding school destroyed on February 1. They were provided with medical care, and the Ukrainian commandant’s office has tried several times since August to organize a “green corridor.”

“There were several agreements that we would provide a green zone for the passage of buses, but these faggots would drive tanks and armored vehicles instead of buses every time, so after the second or third time we stopped offering a green corridor,” said a Ukrainian officer who was in the Kursk region from August to October.

This same story was confirmed to us in the fall by Russian military personnel who were then in the Kursk region.

Ukraine has returned some of the local residents to the Russian Federation via Belarus, but most civilians still remain in the Kursk region occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Russian authorities, both local and federal, are brushing off appeals from relatives of these people, stating that there is no problem. According to the minimum estimate, up to 3,600 civilians may remain in the Kursk region occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This does not include those who died on February 1 in the Sudzhan boarding school from a Russian strike. @Volyamedia

Ukraine is following the conventions by caring for these people, even sending them for elder care inside Ukraine. Russia has committed war crimes in places like Bucha and Kherson; well, the list is long. They continue to hit civilian infrastructure, like schools, inside Ukraine as well because those are decision military centers, I guess. Or hospitals because these are military bases.

Taking the cattle and leaving Grandma behind tells you all about who some of these people are. It was not just grandma. It’s also young children. It’s like Russians don’t care about their people, especially if they have seen kindness from Ukrainians. It’s like it’s always been with Russia.

And it gets darker. Remember what I said about Russians sending the wounded to die so they would not have to pay for the rest of their miserable lives? Well then:

Footage is circulating online of what is allegedly a huge mass grave where the Russians are taking the bodies of their soldiers and burying them as missing. The burial is being done on an industrial scale, with the bodies being transported in large trucks and excavated using excavators. This is apparently being done for both ideological and economic reasons: to hide the scale of the losses and to save on payments to families.

The screencap is from that video. It’s a large mass grave. The wonder is if, in decades to come, they will recognize this as a military cemetery. Given that there are mass graves from the gulags under roads don’t count on it. Most importantly, they can keep pretending the losses are not that high and save money by declaring the dead missing.

They are counting on relatives taking their word that private so and so is missing. Someday, that private will come home. Someday will never come, and the family will not get closure either. Cruelty is the point.

This is the last in this series of cruel and dark pieces. The video that Levin shows has two men receiving electric shocks. The tool is a field telephone.

A clear illustration of the methods of maintaining discipline in the RF Armed Forces: bullying, torture, executions.

Reducing soldiers to the level of intimidated cattle. You can do anything with such material.

Any discipline is based solely on fear. Even self-discipline (for example, the fear of disappointing yourself or your brothers-in-arms).

And here it’s the most primitive thing — at the level of reflexes: if you obey, there’s no current; if you don’t obey, there’s current.

Like with rats.

But such primitiveness is effective if you just need obedient biomass.

When your tactics are simple and you simply use numbers to push through.

It doesn’t matter whether those who are being tortured and humiliated are guilty or not — this is done as a warning to others, so that they can see, hear and know.

The Russian army used methods ranging from flogging to holes in the ground for centuries. Western militaries diverged from this brutality around the First World War. The British navy used the old cat of nine tails until the 1880s. We also used flogging, confinement, and reduction in rank, and we still use some of these.

Yet, we do not brand people any longer. We still demote people for infractions. But nobody will flog a soldier or sailor for spitting on the deck. In Russia, they will do that, and worse. Because fear is the driver, not doing your bit for the cause.

In that respect, the Russian military is no different from the imperial army under the Tzars. To avoid revolts, they brought back political officers. I wonder how long it will take for these people to become as hardcore as their NKVD counterparts and start shooting malingers. In some forms, the political officer dates back to the late imperial armies of the Tzars, just like the secret police, in its modern form, dates back to the 1880s.

Russia has a much longer history with these institutions. After all, Ivan the Terrible used the Oprichniki to significant effect. However, in the end, they started to get out of control. Is this the result of the Mongol yoke? And some historians do. When I was taking my coursework in Russian history, this was the precise case my instructor made. The Mongols brought cruelty to the land; he was a Russian emigre, and if there was something Russians were good at, he was not taking responsibility for anything.

They are always victims. Right now, you can see this when they speak of the West, which makes life for Russians more difficult. It is like they can’t connect the dots to the actions of their government and people. I am inclined to believe that after these many centuries, it’s just baked into the Russian national DNA because it is also the DNA of the empire.