“In Russia, journalists don’t ask questions”, one officer suspected of having played a part in the bombing of a residential building in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro told a journalist. The Russian independent media also says that the Kremlin’s efforts to increase the size of its army are doomed to fail, and describes how the Putin regime is trying to keep the Russians in check and strike fear into the international community.
ISTORIES: The Russian Aviation Squadron’s Chief of Staff: “What, Did I Press the Button, or Was I Sitting in the Plane?”
Russian servicemen, who may have been involved in a missile attack on a residential building in Dnipro, avoid questions .
On January 14, a Kh-22 cruise missile struck a residential building in Dnipro, Ukraine.
On January 16, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) announced that it had identified the Russian soldiers involved in the missile attack. SBU opened criminal proceedings against them under Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (violation of the laws and customs of war). Six of these soldiers, whose data were published by the SBU, are members of Russia’s 52nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment, which is based out of the village of Shaikovka, Russia, in the Kaluga oblast. IStories tracked down and reached out to the six soldiers accused by the Ukrainian authorities. Two agreed to answer our questions.
Colonel Oleg Timoshin, 51 years old, is from the city of Olenegorsk, Russia, in the Murmansk oblast. According to the SBU, he’s the commander of the 52nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment.
Major Alexey Ivanenko, 35 years old, is from the city of Morozovsk, Russia, in the Rostov oblast. According to the SBU, he’s the commander of an aviation detachment within the 52nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment. In a conversation with IStories, Ivanenko said he didn't know what happened in Dnipro, because he doesn’t follow the news. “I retired from the army three years ago after I got hit in the head. I retired, now I work in sanitation [septic management],” Ivanenko said.
When asked what he thought about the fact that the SBU had opened a criminal case against him for shelling Dnipro, Ivanenko replied: “Fine, should I surrender now?” Ivanenko doesn’t know anything about Oleg Timoshin, and he “hasn’t heard from the rest [of the people] on the SBU’s list in a long time.” He has no thoughts on Russia’s war in Ukraine, “There’s nothing to think with,” [referencing his head injury].
Dmitry Golenkov, 44 years old, is from the village of Pogara, Russia, in the Bryansk oblast. According to the SBU, he is the chief of staff of an aviation unit within the Shaikovka Aviation Group. Ducking a question about his involvement in the Dnipro attack, Golenkov countered, asking IStories’ correspondent: “Is Crimea [part of] the Russian Federation or not? [...] I, for example, think that Crimea is Russia, always has been, always will be.
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“I said that the four [annexed] regions and Crimea are ours. What does Ukraine have to do with it? I haven’t touched Ukraine. Ukraine is another independent state. (A voice, probably from a friend, is overheard in the background — editor’s note.) It’s Ukraine bombing the territory of the Russian Federation, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia regions. Crimea is being shelled. Why don't you ask me about that? [...] You, miss, are probably from Ukraine. In Russia, journalists don't ask such questions. Journalists don't ask questions at all.”
After several attempts by the correspondent to get an answer from him about the Dnipro attack, Golenkov was indignant: “What, damn it – did I press the button or was I sitting in the plane? [...] Crimea is still ours and everything else is ours. What do you want from us?"
“Do you personally feel sorry for the people who died in Dnipro? 40 people have already died, many are still under the rubble.”
“What people? What are you talking about, I don't understand?”
Another man, next to Golenkov, starts shouting, and Golenkov echoes: “You [Ukraine] are a region of Russia. Just one region of Russia. There won’t even be distinct regions [in Ukraine].” Finally, Golenkov added: “And everything else will be ours. Goodbye, miss."
Dinar Nazirov, 37 years old, was born in 1985 in the city of Bugulma, Russia, in the Republic of Tatarstan. According to the SBU, he’s a navigator with the 52nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment. In an interview with Kirov-TV in 2019, Nazirov said that he decided he wanted to join the military when he was in elementary school. He went on to graduate from the Chelyabinsk Aviation Navigation School.
When asked about his involvement in the shelling of Dnipro, Nazirov, against a background of other male voices, replied that he was a “forester from the forestry service.”
Evgeny Potseluev, 41 years old, as born in the village of Vyazovka, Russia, in Volgograd oblast. According to the SBU, he is an aviation armament engineer with the 52nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment. In a story about the anniversary of the regiment, Kirov-TV reported that Potseluev and his wife and children have been living in Shaikovka for more than 20 years. He graduated from the Krasnodar Aviation Institute (likely referring to the Krasnodar Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots). He decided to enter the military while still in school.
Denis Grigoriev, 40 years old, as born in 1982 in Kostanay, Kazakhstan. According to the SBU, he is a navigator in the 52nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment.
Potseluev and Grigoriev did not respond to our questions.
RIDDLE: The Russian army în 2023
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The Kremlin is sparing no effort to at least partially restore the capability of its armed forces, which continue to shrink amidst heavy fighting. In recent months, neither the large-scale enlistment of prisoners, nor mass conscription, nor supplies of Iranian-made drones, nor command reshuffles coupled with nuclear blackmail have enabled Russia to turn the tide of war in its favor or improve its foreign policy standing.
Nevertheless, the Russian authorities clearly intend to continue the war at any cost in order to at least improve their foreign policy status. They still hope to force Ukraine and the West to broker a ceasefire and/or start negotiations, but only on the Kremlin’s terms, which include at least maintaining control over the occupied territories. These negotiations will buy Russia time to lick its wounds and to launch a new round of its war against Ukraine as well as its confrontation with the US and Europe. All in all, the Kremlin shows no signs of having abandoned its original war aims.
That is why, on 21 December 2022, at its year-end staff meeting, the Russian Ministry of Defence announced plans dubbed by many as a new ‘military reform’. However, reform implies institutional changes and innovations. What Moscow is going to do with its army amidst hostilities looks more like a desperate attempt to solve the most acute problems, or to pretend to be solving them.
Throughout the post-Soviet period, Russia has been reducing the number of its military personnel. The beginning of this process dates back to 1985, to the Soviet era. Still, the Kremlin has always clung to the idea that the Russian army must be quantitatively many times larger than not only any army in the post-Soviet states but also any army of any NATO member state except the United States. That is why, on paper, the manpower ceiling of the Russian armed forces has never fallen below 1 million. This is not only meant to maintain Russia’s status as a superpower, along with veto power on the UN Security Council and its nuclear arsenal, but also to ensure unconditional political dominance over all its neighbors and to serve as a tool for revenge in foreign policy.
This status and revanchist ambitions, which ripened in the 1990s, were designed to permanently cement Russia’s power and property distribution system. Simply put, reliance on revanchism and military might has increasingly become one of the main means of legitimizing Russian power.
Still, objective socio-economic factors have taken their toll. In 1997, the nominal headcount of the Russian armed forces was 1.7 million service personnel, compared with the real number of about 1.2−1.3 million. This number was reduced to 1.135 million in the 2000s. In 2016, it was further cut to 1 million. By then, the real number of military personnel was already 770,000. True, the nominal number was soon increased to 1.013 million servicemen, but this had no effect on the real number. On the contrary, voices could be heard that the nominal number should be brought closer to the real number, i.e. the ideal of an army of a million soldiers should finally be abandoned.
In August 2022, six months into the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin decided to increase the nominal headcount of the armed forces by as many as 137,000 service personnel — to 1.150 million — in 2023. Four months later, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the nominal size of the armed forces should reach 1.5 million service personnel over the next few years, 695,000 of whom (soldiers, sergeants, warrant officers, etc.) should serve under contract. The political decision has already been taken, although the relevant decree had not been published by the time this article was written.
Thus, formally, the Russian army is going back to the late 1990s in terms of its number of personnel. However, a quarter of a century ago, the military staff included specialists in charge of maintaining military equipment and vehicles as well as military infrastructure inherited from the USSR which no longer exist today. Additionally, there were tens of thousands of auxiliary positions like military financial officers and army construction workers which have also ceased to exist. In other words, the nominal size of the armed forces cannot be increased in a realistic and meaningful way.
Here, too, the accounting and organizational needs of the military leadership probably played a major role. Compensation for killed and wounded military personnel, increased combat pay and preparations for mass conscription that started in September created a cash gap. Until the end of 2022, the cash deficit could be managed by inflating the military budget ad hoc, but 2023 requires a systemic solution. After all, extra soldiers and officers on paper cost the military budget no less than an additional 300−400 billion rubles, which requires more than impromptu decisions.
However, it has already become apparent that, in just a few months, the additional 137,000 positions in the army created on 1 January 2023 will no longer be enough for the Russian military leadership, and the headcount will have to be increased by another 350,000 servicemen. In other words, an emergency military budget of at least 5 trillion rubles in 2022 and over 5 trillion rubles in 2023 will become the norm regardless of when and how the war ends.
At the same time, the Russian command is sparing no effort to restore at least the real manpower of the armed forces that existed prior to the invasion, i.e. 740,000−780,000 military personnel. Of these, 250,000 troops have officially taken part in fighting (‘gained combat experience’). It is difficult to say for sure whether this figure includes those military personnel who were killed or wounded, members of Rosgvardiya (Russia’s National Guard), mercenaries and conscripts from the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. […]
As for the prospect of 695,000 contract servicemen alone, i.e. 70% more than the headcount in 2020, it looks simply absurd in the context of Russia’s socio-economic and demographic situation with mass conscription remaining in place. […]
If we treat the idea of an army of 1.5 million soldiers seriously, given that, besides 695,000 contract soldiers, there is a correspondingly greater number of officers (although no more than 1 million officers in total, and it is still unclear how to increase their number) and obviously conscripts, this might turn out to be an unbearable burden for taxpayers and the economy. Suffice it to mention that there are fewer than 75 million people in the workforce in Russia, fewer than 71 million of whom are employed. And it is one thing to offer vacancies on paper, and a totally different thing to fill these positions with real people pulled away from productive activities. […]
MEDUZA: The Kremlin inspires fear, but this strategy if becoming ineffective
How Russia’s attempt to lead the world through fear failed, and why it is still working in Russia.
In many of its actions, the Russian leadership continues to rely on fear. Recently, this kind of tactics has had different results at home and abroad. According to the Kremlin’s plans, Ukrainian society was expected to fear a large-scale invasion and surrender without resisting. However, Ukraine did not scare easily and did not surrender. Europeans were expected to fear the suspension of natural gas deliveries and “admit to have wronged” Russia and lift the sanctions in exchange for Russia resuming gas deliveries. None of this happened. Another attempt to strike fear into the world was when Russia threatened to use nuclear weapons, but even this didn’t have any impact on the course of the war. There is only one sector where the Kremlin succeeded in spreading fear: at home, Meduza writes.
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The state intimidated Russian society over the course of Putin’s entire term in office. Last year, such repressive actions were “unprecedented”, according to data published by OVD-Info. The number of criminal investigations launched last year into anti-war actions (378) is similar to the number of investigations linked to the repressive campaigns in the last ten years, starting with the Bolotnaya Square protests.
Legislative action was taken in this respect: the Criminal Code was amended, with the introduction of new articles regulating “the dissemination of false information about the Russian armed forces” and “public actions designed to discredit the Russian army”. Criminal sentences were also introduced for “confidential” cooperation with other states and organizations, for actions and public instigations against state security and for violating procedural standards linked to classified information.
The authorities also passed laws on “foreign agents” and introduced a total ban on the so-called propaganda of “non-traditional sexual relations”.
One major instrument whereby the regime exerted pressure on society was the promotion of businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, all with Putin’s blessing, of course. His elevation does not, however, mean that the state loses its monopoly on violence, but it is merely an attempt to control the criminal underworld and assign it to its own service. The Russian state doesn’t seem to want to consolidate its legitimacy, but to subjugate the Russian society by force, material gain and, already to a lesser extent, propaganda.
Following the Kremlin’s repressive actions, society is now divided, split into unequal groups. A large part of the population does not necessarily support the war, but it tacitly believes it is inevitable, thus looking for opportunities to survive and even take advantage of the newly created situation. As financial expert Alexander Kolyandr notes, the Kremlin is concerned with the creation of social categories that would be interested in the extension of the war. For the hundreds of thousands of contract servicemen and mobilized people, military pay far exceeds all other sources of income in times of peace.
Those who have some sort of connections with the defense sector, the import substitution industry and the new import schemes meant to bypass sanctions have a lot to gain too. This category of citizens, although it does not exceed half of the population, outnumbers other groups, last year’s emigrants (those who oppose the regime, the war or try to dodge mobilization), especially as the mobilization campaign is likely to continue. The Kremlin has replaced the lack of fighting spirit with material incentives and a new vector for economic growth without a tangible alternative.
Scare tactics and the threat of repression have allowed the Kremlin to quell anti-war protests and drive away part of the war’s opponents. Against the backdrop of waning export-derived revenues, the most important subject of division is the state budget, which is increasingly war-oriented. This makes people either hide their opinion, either to compete among themselves in displays of loyalty. Compared to Ukraine, Europe and the USA, Russia was more easily subdued with the help of fear. Fear has paralyzed Russian society.
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