Day 258: November 08After the huge losses of the Russian 155th marine brigade were exposed, the public actually started looking into the information about Russian losses. This immediately brought to light many other problems of the Russian Army that were silenced by the authorities.One of the issues that attracted a lot of attention became Russian losses due to friendly fire. According to the Former Security Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, friendly fire may have caused up to 60% of total Russian losses since May.Now, friendly fire is inevitable, and in intense battles such as those that we see in Ukraine, it is in double digits. However, when you kill more of your troops than your enemy, something is definitely wrong. The main cause of the friendly fire is bad communication and lack of cooperation between different units that are engaged in the same attack. And such massive problems are not surprising because the Russian Army is more of Frankenstein rather than a seamlessly working unit, and here is why.President Putin tried to avoid mobilization for as long as he could. And in order to leave the general population untouched and unconcerned with the war, he constructed his army mainly from separate proxy units. So, the Russian Army consists of a limited number of professional regular forces, the Donetsk People’s Republic forces, the Luhansk People’s Republic forces, Chechen forces, private military companies’ forces (with the most prominent one being the Wagner Group), and now also with unprofessional newly mobilized forces.Firstly, these forces have different levels of equipment. For example, the professional regular forces have enough night vision goggles, while the DPR or LPR forces or newly mobilized men do not, which means that they cannot work together effectively at night, which happens a lot between Svatove and Siversk.Secondly, these forces have different specialties. Since the Wagner Group was mainly involved in storming settlements, and regular forces mostly operated in open fields, combining them together is also ineffective.Thirdly, and most importantly, these forces have separate and different in nature chains of command. This means that when several different units are deployed in the same region, let’s say Soledar, instead of cooperating with the units on the ground directly, they communicate through several intermediaries in the form of commanders, and we all know how the broken telephone works, especially if the situation on the ground is very dynamic.Lastly, it even may not be in the interest of the commanders to cooperate. Instead, there is internal competition between the main commanders of forces who are trying to gain political power inside Russia. The Russian Ministry of Defense is trying to impose its rules and take credit for all success. The leader of the Wagner Group is trying to undermine the power of the Russian Ministry of Defense and shift it to his advantage. He is already opening local militia centers that will function outside of the Russian Armed Forces, so he is basically creating his own army. The leader of the Chechen forces is also trying to use this conflict to his advantage and develop an even stronger army inside the Chechen Republic, simultaneously gaining support from Putin. The leaders of the DPR and LPR forces play a similar game but on a lower level – they are just trying to stay in power in their republics. In this struggle for power, it would not be surprising if these miscommunication issues were artificially caused in order to make one party fail and allow the second one to take all the credit for the unclaimed success.But the soldiers that are dying on the ground are not interested in this power game because it is played at their expense. The marines from Pavlivka openly accuse Russian commanders of using them as cannon fodder just because they were promised some medals for this suicidal attack. The Ukrainians understand this and obviously try to exploit it. That is why they created and have been actively promoting in Russia a system where the Russians can submit applications to surrender. The Ukrainians started receiving thousands of applications, especially from the Ukrainians that were mobilized by force on the Russian-occupied territories. Many Ukrainians were so angry that they were forced to fight for Russia that they immediately switched sides, which means that formally the Ukrainians were recruiting Russian soldiers!After Russian authorities found out about it, they blocked the system, but it did not help. The Russians started using telegram bots and other available tools.