When Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine in the early morning hours of February 24, 2022, he thought it would be a quick one-and-done kind of thing. But it turns out that the Russian dictator may have been a victim of his own propaganda and believed that his country’s military was much stronger and more advanced than they really are—and erroneously believed that Ukraine’s military was weak.
Less than three weeks into the Russia Ukraine War, more than 7,000 of Putin’s soldiers had been killed, which The New York Times described as a “staggering” loss of life. Apart from that, the Russian army is woefully unprepared and lacking in the most basic necessities. In May, The Daily Beast reported that soldiers were calling their parents and begging them for money so that they could buy their own protective gear. In a new report, The Daily Beast says that Russian officials are now asking citizens to donate money to help better outfit their soldiers. In other words, Russia is attempting to crowdfund its own war.
As The Daily Beast’s Allison Quinn writes:
Russian officials are asking local residents in one Novosbibirsk community to crowdfund equipment for troops fighting in Ukraine.
Officials in Morskoy used the popular networking sites Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte to plead for donations to buy quadcopters, gas generators, binoculars, compression bandages, and combat application tourniquets used by the U.S. and other NATO countries, according to the Siberian news outlet Taiga.info.
“The goods can be handed over to the administration of Morskoy village on business days,” one posting reportedly read, along with pro-Putin and pro-war hashtags. The appeals were later deleted.
It was later reported that that so-called “wish list” was specifically intended to help one anti-aircraft missile squadron, which didn’t really answer the question as to why the Russian government wasn’t supplying its own soldiers with such basic necessities as bandages.
The Daily Beast cited a story from The Moscow Times, in which a soldier (anonymously, of course) told the paper that they have been forced “to buy everything ourselves, with our own money. I’m not even talking about modern body armor and helmets: there are no warm clothes, no dry rations or first-aid kits.” The soldier also said that the equipment they have been given is old and unreliable. “The weapons just jam,” he said. “We ask the command to provide at least some additional protection. They just shrug.”
(Via The Daily Beast)