The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, located in modern Belarus, formally ended Bolshevik Russia’s participation in World War I on March 3, 1918. Since then, both the Red Army and its successor, the Russian Armed Forces (Armed Forces of the Russian Federation), which were established in 1992, have had a notorious reputation for badly treating their own soldiers and the enemy.
A prime example of Bolshevik brutality was the summary execution of 2,000 rebelling sailors at Kronstadt in March 1921. A second example, three years earlier, was Lenin’s execution of the Tsar’s entire family by firing squad, including his five children, on July 17, 1918, in the southern Ural Mountain city of Yekaterinburg.
A last example was that out of the 91,000 German soldiers captured at Stalingrad (Volgograd) in 1943, only 5,000 to 6,000 “broken men” ever returned to Germany or their homeland in the mid-1950s. That is because all the captives were unmercifully used as slave labor, dying mostly from starvation, disease, cold, and overwork.
Today, the reasons for the dysfunction and diminishment of the Russian Armed Forces, especially the army, are manifold. The Russian army, including the Red Army, has had a long history of rape (1945; 2025), gang rape (1945), executing and gunning downretreating soldiers (Order No. 227), inhumane treatment of prisoners of war, suicidal (“meat grinder”) frontal assaults, endemic corruption, low morale, and child abduction.
The army also has had extensive problems with inadequate training, torture, extortion, corruption, war crimes, desertion, ad nauseum.
Welcome to Putin’s occupied Ukraine.
Much of Russia’s overrated non-nuclear armed forces, especially in Ukraine, can be attributed to one deplorable despot since December 31, 1999: Vladimir Putin.
The Russian army, which has “1.1 million active-duty soldiers” and 300,000 active reservists, has been in a state of decrepit disrepair because of a lack of political and military leadership. NATO presently believes that the “total number of Russian dead and wounded in the war [so far] is 1.1 million, and … there have been 250,000 fatalities.”
The Russian army has been embarrassingly unable to defeat a much smaller Ukrainian army using conventional warfare and drones since February 24, 2024. This has also been caused by Russian military incompetence.
That is because the supreme commander-in-chief of Russia’s armed forces, Vladimir Putin, has been an overrated amateur with limited military training, which has certainly been good news for Ukraine. This is why Ukrainian drones have been decimating Russian tanks. Unbelievably, “Russia started the war with around 10,000 tanks, … but that has dropped to somewhere over 3,000,” while “it can produce only about 200 per year.”
Welcome to Putin’s occupied Ukraine.
I recently read a shocking article in the New York Times, which was published on December 31, entitled, “How Russia’s War Machine Brutalizes and Exploits Its Own Soldiers.” It was collectively written by Paul Sonne, Anton Troianovski, Milana Mazaeva, Nataliya Vasilyeva, and Alina Lobzina.
The article was based on “more than 6,000 confidential complaints,” which were “inadvertently posted online by the Russian government.” The plethora of leaked complaints was either deliberately or accidentally released online by an unknown person or group of people between April and September 2025. All the original complaints of abuse were first “submitted to the Russian human rights ombudsman, Tatyana N. Moskalkova, who reports to Mr. Putin.”
Who and how these complaints were leaked is a mystery, but they all reflected a deep disenchantment with the Russian war in Ukraine among the Russian soldiers’ parents, friends, and relatives.
The Times ultimately received the leaked information from “Maxim Kurnikov, the founder and editor of Echo, an online Russian news outlet in Berlin.” Both the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense refused to comment. He and his team collected the files and provided them to the Times.
Ms. Moskalkova’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
I was sickened to read about Russia’s brutal military leadership and tactics. They have not changed much since the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which was initially headed by the tri-headed monsters of Lenin, Trotsky, and later Stalin.
Putin, who psychotically admires and venerates Stalin, one of history’s worst mass murderers, has become a total tyrant in brutalizing his own enlisted soldiers during his “special military operation” in Ukraine. His top-down Ivan-the-Terrible sadism knows no bounds as epitomized in the medieval death or “execution” by poison of political opponent and dissident Alexei Navalny on February 16, 2024.
Welcome to Putin’s occupied Ukraine.
To be continued
Robert L. Maronic
