Refusenik riot police troops in Russia have been branded “cowards and traitors” for defying Vladimir Putin ’s orders to fight in Ukraine.
A furious Siberian-based Interior Ministry commander has been recorded lambasting his rebellious forces over their mutiny, with the audio highlighted by a YouTube channel linked to jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
"Let's call a spade a spade - weaklings, cowards and traitors,” said the loyalist Putin commander, threatening the police troops with a lifetime of disgrace and harassment by the secret services.
He told them of another incident when 11 elite troops from Siberian region Khakassia refused to fight in the invasion.
“They've all been fired,” he said.
"When people had to stand up for their country, for some reason they bottled it."
He continued: "How do you intend to live afterwards? Life (will go on) In two or three weeks, this crap will be over. How will you live afterwards?
“I don't think an officer has the right to quit the battlefield.
"You have practically gone down the road of criminality and treason. I don't know what is worse.”
The commander threated to boot the troops out of the force and accused them of "cowardice and a lack of moral fibre".
“Individually, go up to a puddle, look into it, and say 'I'm a (expletive) coward," he commanded.
“You've betrayed your country, you've betrayed your unit. You've betrayed your units.
“And the main thing is not that you've betrayed me, but you've betrayed your own ideals, your unit.”
He finished the six-minute rant, captured on voice note, by adding: “We'll do all we can so that your surnames are given to your schools, your colleges, places where you studied, grew up and so on.
“So that your parents will know who they brought up.
"We've got 445 wounded. That's the wounded in our entire battle group.
"And that's the lowest of the lot. The Airborne Troops have had several times more.
"Dozens of times more. Dozens of times more! And other groups have loads more casualties.”
“We're at war now. Yes, you will stay alive, but you will be an outcast."
He claimed the Russian security agency FSB had put the earlier group of deserters "under special control", suggesting they could be branded as Ukrainian spies.
"God knows, maybe they are Ukrainian traitors," the commander continued.
"They are fighting, we and you are fighting, the whole state is fighting, the whole machine.
"I think that you, colleagues, are making a very grave mistake in life.
“Why didn't the Covid nurses desert? Tell me. Explain that to me, why were they dying in those Covid hospitals, why didn't they desert?
“You have your war, or rather we do, with assault rifles, machine-guns. Are you really weaker than those girls?"
This week Jeremy Fleming, the head of the UK's cyber-intelligence agency GCHQ, said that the Russian's decision to move its operation away from Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv showed that they had "massively misjudged the situation".
"We've seen Russian soldiers - short of weapons and morale - refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft," he said in a speech to the Australian National University in Canberra.
"And even though Putin's advisers are afraid to tell him the truth, what's going on and the extent of these misjudgements must be crystal clear to the regime."
