Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, it drew attention not only to the general demotivation of Russian soldiers in the first months of the war, but also to the need to increasingly pay higher salaries to the Z troops recruited from Russian regions to maintain a constant flow of new reserves to the front. Every month, Vladimir Putin must pay a higher amount to each new volunteer, even though the death or serious injury rate is around 50% of those sent, and the survival rate between eight and 10 days in the case of infantry.
Russia not only invests huge amounts of money in domestic propaganda in its own country and abroad, sometimes with different messages, but also tries to continue motivating its troops with simple, almost always false but effective messages, so they do not stop fighting.
EL MUNDO has obtained one of the pamphlets, about 20 pages long, that the Russian army gives to its new recruits. It was in the pocket of a prisoner recently captured by Ukraine's Brigade 65 on the Zaporiyia front, and it explains the alleged differences between the model Russian soldiers, defenders of the rules of war and full of humanity, and the heartless Ukrainian soldiers, perpetrators of crimes and cowards when it comes to killing civilians or using them as human shields.
This moralizing fiction from the Kremlin, which does not require literacy to understand, hits with a terrible reality on the battlefield: one would have to go back a long way to find, in the history of human conflicts, a troop more prone to looting, to the gratuitous killing of civilians, and to the torture and murder of unarmed prisoners.
In one of the most documented crimes in history, Russian military killed more than 400 civilians in the town of Bucha during the first weeks of the invasion. The same behavior was shown in the occupied region of Izium, where they buried 478 people shot in the head in mass graves. And the same pattern of torture and executions was repeated in Kherson, also liberated in the fall of 2023.
The vignette of Russian soldiers showing compassion for newly captured Ukrainian soldiers is also contradicted by a reality documented by Russian soldiers themselves, who have even recorded videos posing proudly with the decapitated heads of Ukrainians.
In another vignette, a Russian soldier offers a teddy bear to a Ukrainian child. It is worth noting that both Vladimir Putin and the Russian commissioner for children's rights, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, are wanted by the International Criminal Court for the illegal deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.
In another message from the pamphlet, we see how the Russian soldier goes to church to pray as a guarantor of the Christianity that Putin's regime boasts of, while the Ukrainian is shown burning the temple. It is hard to find, throughout the battlefield, any church that has not been systematically bombed by Russia, just like schools and especially hospitals, spaces protected by the Geneva Convention.
The last vignette in the notebook refers to family. While the Russian soldier walks hand in hand with a woman and a child, two Ukrainian men are depicted embracing in a bathtub surrounded by hearts, alluding to a homosexual relationship, as a degeneration, something that fits perfectly with the ultraconservative revolution that the regime has launched in Russia.