17 Jun: "Only 12% Survive the First Attack" Last Words of a Russian Soldier Unravel Terrifying Truth - RFU

Day 845: Jun 17

Today, there are a lot of updates from the Kharkiv direction.

Here, over the last several weeks, Russians have made a series of desperate attempts to accelerate their offensive operations to finally overcome the first Ukrainian defense line. However, all their attempts have failed and Russians have gradually lost momentum, while Ukrainians have developed a more offensive stance and taken the initiative into their own hands, creating an even more deadly environment for those enemy troops trying to move forward in the directions of Lyptsi and Vovchansk. This spiked the daily death toll significantly, and the resulting high number of accumulated losses led to the further slowdown of the Russian offensive and the turn of events in favor of the Ukrainians.

The first main reason for such huge losses was that Russians tried to use a new tactic, which did not work as the Russian commanders expected. At the beginning of the Kharkiv offensive, military analysts from different countries reported about the change in general tactics that the Russians were deploying. The main idea of this tactic was to use smaller assault groups of no more than five people to penetrate Ukrainian positions through many points before merging with other such groups and uniting into a larger strike group. Experts recently started to put this tactic into doubt as it requires a high level of coordination, so in reality, many of these small groups never merged. Russian military analysts issued concerns that the use of it may be not only contributing to higher Russian manpower and material losses, but also resulting in the premature decline of the offensive in the Kharkiv direction. This was confirmed by Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets, who noted that these growing losses are leading to a significant decrease in the overall pace of Russian offensive operations.

Secondly, one Russian military commentator, who previously served as a “Storm-Z” unit instructor, complained that using small groups while trying to advance is indicative of poor training and preparation and not an effective new tactic. One video from a drone that was published by operators of the Ukrainian Third Separate Assault Brigade gives a shocking confirmation of this statement and the state of preparedness of these troops. A Russian soldier can be seen sitting in a trench when an FPV drone approaches him for an attack. There was some initial defect in the drone, and it couldn’t detonate. What happens next is beyond imagination, as the Russian soldier decides to push his luck too far and starts hitting the blocked drone with a stick, which leads to a successful explosion and a suicidal outcome. The original uncensored footage can be found on our Telegram through the link in the description.

More confirmations for the high casualty rate in the Russian army are provided by their soldiers in the following videos. The first footage comes from the vicinity of Vovchansk, where one Russian soldier from the 1009th Motorized Rifle Regiment is complaining on camera that the initial size of the 5th company in which he serves was one hundred people and after an attempted assault against the city, they were reduced to only twelve. The second footage is from one Russian prisoner of war, whose campaign lasted only 2 days as he was reasonable enough to surrender quickly to Ukrainian forces near Vovchansk. He can be seen explaining that his unit consisted of 50 soldiers, but after the first attack, only 6 survived, and they all immediately surrendered to avoid being sent into attacks again.

These grim confessions of ordinary Russian soldiers about their survival rate of 12% sound just in correspondence with other numbers provided by Ukrainian authorities. For example, the Ukrainian Chief of the General Staff Anatoliy Barhylevych stated recently that during the peak heat, Russian forces have lost up to 1740 wounded and killed soldiers in the Kharkiv direction in a single day, which is an insanely high rate of casualties, especially if compared to the initial forces the Russian command summoned for their endeavor. It is no surprise that these numbers skyrocketed even more after Ukrainians started targeting enemy evacuation and supply routes on Russian territory...