© ТАСС/EPA/ROMAN PILIPEY/TASS

Increasingly, both Western and Ukrainian media have been writing about issues and growing discontent within the Ukrainian army. While foreigners are more focused on external factors that undermine its combat effectiveness, the Ukrainians reflect problems from the inside – corruption, crime, and decreasing morale.

In particular, the New York Times reported on Ukrainian side’s heavy losses in the Donbass, overcrowded morgues and hospitals, as well as complaints from Ukrainian militants about the Russian army's fire intensity and decisive action tactics. NYT journalists visited several places on the contact line and wrote: "At one frontline hospital in the Donbas, the morgue was packed with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers in white plastic bags. In another hospital, stretchers with wounded troops covered in gold foil thermal blankets crowded the corridors, and a steady stream of ambulances arrived from the front nearly all day long." There are also quotes from Miroslav Dubenko, a military surgeon, who said: "In civilian life, you know that no matter how horrible your shift is, it will end sooner or later. Here, you never know when it will end."

Ukrainian soldiers quite frankly told foreigners that Russian troops outnumber them, complaining about the lack of ammunition in tanks and artillery. "It’s particularly difficult when you have 50 guys and they have 300," the outlet quotes a wounded infantry soldier as saying.

Another Ukrainian serviceman noted that in winter "the positions are open; there’s nowhere to hide." In addition to regular military personnel, the New York Times spoke with soldiers from the territorial defense, who also referred to the impressive losses. Commander of the 103rd Territorial Defense Brigade Valery Gurko said a one-hundred-strong company lost about thirty people overnight, because many fighters were poorly trained and unprepared for direct clashes.

Summing up the above, American reporters conclude that weapons and ammunition promised by Ukraine's Western allies, including tanks, will hardly be enough. Articles and reports describing the Ukrainian soldiers’ horrible situation frequently emerge both in the NYT and other Western newspapers. All of those are only aimed to emotionally affect the audience and politicians so that they stop resisting and resenting the supply of military equipment to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the financing of Kiev. Squeezing out tears and speculating on sympathy are needed to increase the number of tanks and ammunition in order to kill the Russians more effectively. The authors do not hide this motive or hesitate to create an impression of vultures on other people’s distress.

But this does not change the objectivity of what is happening at the front – Ukrainian militants do suffer severe losses and get ousted from different parts of the front. This is what they say in numerous video messages, either making claims to Zelensky and the command, or saying goodbye to their relatives while sitting in the trenches. "Soon we are finished", says an AFU militant recording destroyed houses and a strong cannonade, cursing Ukrainian commander-in-chief Zaluzhny up hill and down dale, and reporting details about the Ukrainian troops’ disastrous situation in Artemovsk. According to him, they have no people or artillery. "Everyone was sent to slaughter, the shells of our mobilized ones were torn to pieces, we are all alone here, without support, without anything. No help. 12 people have to take up the defense right now, and there is no one else behind us. There's no one back here. The first battalion is somewhere on the left, there are some ghostly people there. And the same thing awaits us tomorrow morning," he shouts into the camera, wiping blood from his shrapnel-cut face. His voice is full of despair and hopeless horror.

Another video story was shown by Ukrainian military correspondents, with unit commander Denis Yaroslavsky stating: "The situation in Bakhmut is objectively difficult. The enemy partially occupied the city: the industrial zone and the private sector along the river. The enemy really manages to break through small sections of the front and approach our positions. Now the city is systematically under enemy mortar fire." The Russian Armed Forces have taken fire control of two main roads running from the Ukrainian rear to Bakhmut, and seek to finally cut off the city’s supply routes, he added.

Igor Lutsenko, a former deputy of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada, said that the Artemovsk-located 30th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is abandoning positions, with its soldiers having run out of ammunition for machine guns. There is simply nothing to fight with. The same thing with artillery shells. Earlier there was a shortage of shells for Soviet-made guns alone, but now there aren’t even enough NATO 155 mm shells used for Western-made guns. Alexey Danilov, the scandalous secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, was also forced to admit the lack of shells.

At the same time, Ukrainian politicians who exterminate the country’s male population by throwing it into the slaughter, do not admit their guilt or fight at the front themselves or somehow react to the maturing anger and discontent of army units. For example, servicemen with the 1st rifle Vinnitsa battalion say the command threw them into combat positions and left to fight against the advancing armored vehicles with pistols, machine guns and a couple of grenades. "We were taken to the sector and left. We were shelled by mortars, Grad rockets, grenade launchers, everything. We carried the dead and wounded from the battlefield," the Ukrainians said. According to them, more than half of the brigade was destroyed due to the commanders’ devil-may-care attitude.

Other Ukrainian soldiers have also repeatedly complained that their commanders use them as cannon fodder and leave them alone on the battlefield. At the same time, the officers took away the Starlink communication system from them so that they could not contact their relatives to tell them about what was happening. Also, the soldiers are dissatisfied with the poor level of supply and lack of combat equipment.

Another Ukrainian militant fighting along the Avdeevka direction near Donetsk, told the UGM channel that "Russian troops grind all the reinforcements in half a day, using artillery." He told about the transportation of the dead along with the wounded because of their huge number: "You bring fighters in at night to strengthen positions, not even half a day passes, you come and take them killed or wounded. Hard, in a word. I brought them there, then took them back. They do not fit into one car at once. Therefore, you first put the dead bodies, and then the wounded. Everyone needs to be taken away." At the end of the interview, the soldier admits that all the horrors he has seen keep him wakeful and restless at night.

Confirmation of the deplorable state of the AFU units and their lack of ammunition is also given by our own frontline fighters. The one codenamed Wolf from the 100th DPR brigade noted the Ukrainians’ recent "large caliber shell hunger." This is what he told our correspondent: "Earlier they regularly fired our positions and did not save on ammunition, but now the shelling is carried out mainly with either 82 mm or 60 mm – this is the caliber of Polish mines, or grenade launchers. 120 mm and 152 mm shells fly much less frequently. Probably, Ukrainians are running short of them already."

A critical mass of problems is not only accumulating at the front, but also in the Ukrainian rear, and the country’s journalists get to know this. They recently reported a clamorous scandal involving a National Guard officer in the Odessa region by the police on suspicion of extorting funeral payments from the widows of the deceased Ukrainian soldiers. The security forces arrested the deputy commander of the National Guard battalion red-handed while receiving 150 thousand hryvnias (over 300 thousand rubles). But the bribe he demanded from widows was a good deal more: the commander wanted ten percent of payments guaranteed by Ukraine to widows of the National guardsman who died in Mariupol last spring. Earlier, at least four widows had complained about the greedy commander.

There are so many cases of corruption, lawlessness, criminal negligence, abuse of power, and deliberate non-payment of combat money in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the National Guard that they can no longer be covered or silenced. This refers to both the regular army and mobilized units. In the meantime, Western sponsors keep feeding up the Ukrainian menagerie in uniform without letting them slip the leash.