Russian marines admitted catastrophic losses and slammed Vladimir Putin for losing 300 men in four days of heavy fighting at Pavlivka.
The Kremlin's troops attacked the “incompetent” generals for treating them as “meat” and demanded in a letter that Putin is personally told of the alleged massacre.
The letter comes during growing reports of Russian forces staging mutinies in multiple locations over his increasingly unpopular and costly war.
A pro-Kremlin war reporter highlighted the bloodbath in Pavlivka - known as Pavlovka in Russia - because he fears the marines are becoming “meat mixed with earth and boards”.
Marines of the 155th Marine Brigade wrote to their regional governor Oleg Kozhemyako in Primorsky in a bid to get their message to Putin.
They stated in the leaked communique: "Yet again we were thrown into an incomprehensible attack by Generals [Rustam] Muradov and [Zurab] Akhmedov so that Muradov could get bonuses from [chief of the general staff Valery] Gerasimov, and his promised Hero of Russia [medal].
“As a result of the ‘carefully planned’ attack by these ‘great commanders’, we lost about 300 people in four days, killed, wounded and missing.
“We lost 50 per cent of our military equipment, and this was just our brigade.”
The commanders “are hiding” the mayhem in the Donetsk region and “playing down the number of losses for fear of being held responsible”, they claimed.
The marines continued: “They don't care about anything but themselves, they call people cannon fodder.
“We ask you to get in touch with the supreme [commander Putin] so that a commission is sent to investigate what happened.
“How much longer should we be standing it for!”
The governor claimed the letter could be a fake, however, multiple Russian sources indicate the letter from the marines is genuine.
After claims that the letter may have been the work of Ukrainian special forces, he hit back on Monday and denied his account had been hacked, stating: “The goal is to save [Russian forces]. Let them become heroes, not meat mixed with earth and boards.”
Another pro-Russian war reporter called the Pavlikva, Semyon Pegov, said the slaughter of the marines was “extremely depressing news”.
One more pro-Kremlin war reporter Alexey Sukonkin said “terrible bloodshed was taking place in Pavlivka, as soon as the first battalion came under distribution on the outskirts of the village”.
The regional governor “will have to answer for the mediocrity of a commander who organised this bloody holiday. He will have to look into the eyes of widows and orphaned children. An unenviable fate.”
