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Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
BBC reported it a few hours ago, you right though its weird frankly, its not like Putin has seemed to care whether he had support from other ex warsaw pact or random bits of old CCCP, I do wonder if Russian troops are refusing orders now that the scale of what they are involved in becomes clear and so they are casting about for non Russian troops
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This is a situation where the definition of "Russian" gets complicated. Russia is a large multi-ethnic federation, with about 20% not-ethnic-Russians, and as many have reported, there seem to be plenty of those people among the troops invading Ukraine.
The reports from the civilians make it sound like things are somewhat chaotic among the Russian troops. Lots of reports of small groups of soldiers on foot running around asking for food and directions from the locals, wtf is that?
I mean, I guess that's what you get when a couple of days ago the troops thought they were just participating in exercises.
The situation also makes it absolutely impossible for the Russian officers to maintain control over the information their soldiers are getting. This isn't something like Iraq; every Russian soldier shares at a language with every civilian, they can understand the Ukrainian media perfectly well, and they might even be more exposed to it than their own media right now. The Ukrainian civilians aren't strange and scary, they look like people the soldiers know back home. Every Ukrainian mother that comes raging or begging at them will sound like someone's own mother.
If the conflicts starts to drag on, the troops will inevitably either mingle more and more with the locals as they start to establish bases of operation and settle down, or start hardening themselves and treating all locals as hostiles.
It must be a special kind of hell for the soldiers, and I see a fairly decent chance that Russian troop cohesion might plummet fairly quickly.
If the bodycount among Russian troops starts to go up in a prolonged fight, that can very quickly unite the troops against locals, but that really isn't beneficial either for Putins longterm plans, because it will also harden the locals against Russian rule, and holding on to your win will get difficult.
If the will to fight among Ukrainians is really as high as we are seeing in the media, there's no way this will be over anytime soon. 200.000 soldiers are not nearly enough to contain 44 million people in a huge geographical area.