Full article eventsinukraine.substack.com…

Beatings and mass casualties in the 225th assault regiment. Soldier Oleg Seryk has been sharing these photos and videos the past 5 days on Instagram. He says that the commanders of the 225th forbid the 'hundreds of bodies' lying in the forests of Huliapole from being retrieved. They are registered as missing in action, meaning that relatives receive no compensation payments for killed soldiers.

Full article eventsinukraine.substack.com…

The musical initiations for soldiers in the 425th assault regiment. This unit is famous for mass battlefield casualties in suicide missions and systematic beatings, torture, and killings of their own troops. The troops are largely forcibly mobilized old men and drug addicts, often mobilized directly in their methadone replacement clinics. In the second video, you can see a 'happily dancing' old man start coughing out of exhaustion. There have been dozens of deaths from tuberculosis in this unit this year.

There has been much talk over the past two months of grand reforms in Ukraine’s army. These reforms have supposedly put an end to the many scandalous cases of beatings, torture, killings, blocking detachments, and mass casualties revealed in the summer. In reality, the usual practices continue. How else to motivate forcibly mobilized drug addicts and grandfathers to go die at the front? So the beatings continue, in the pits, the trenches, and tied to snowy trees. It’s just that the media has stopped covering it, because the new commander-in-chief of the army, Mikhailo Drapaty, is much-liked by the western-funded press. Nevertheless, some soldiers still post photos and videos of the abuses to Instagram. Military telegram channels continue to complain about incompetent fighting practices leading to massive losses. The bodies are abandoned, commanders forbidding their retrieval — registered as ‘missing in action’, there is no need to pay relatives. Meanwhile, we get videos of newly-mobilized troops forced to smile and dance for the camera. Small wonder there is little information. It can be dangerous bringing attention to certain things. In mid-October, a female soldier mysteriously died at the front right after sharing the sexual abuse she’d been subject to in her unit. Though she voluntarily signed up to the army as a drone operator, she was instead sent to the infantry. Many of her comrades believe that her death was a case of ‘zeroing’ — a punishment whereby one is sent on a mission with no chance of survival. Besides all this, we’ll also look at Azov’s PR offensive in defense of these infamous units. This involves a rather bizarre mini-film Azov recently released portraying Russia’s soldiers as the kind hobbits of Lord of the Rings, prompting outrage from many Ukrainian patriots. Full article in reply

A mobilization update. The government plans to intensify recruitment efforts. Manpower will probably be more necessary than ever due to the restriction of US military aid, crucial for Ukrainian drone airpower. More killings at the Territorial Recruitment Centres (TRC). A half-blind old man mobilized, released due to his infirmities at a distant bridge without a phone, and now missing for 8 days. A psychologist who tried to flee Ukraine by swimming to Moldova rammed and beaten with oars by Ukrainian border guards. The increasing cases of mobilized men opening fire on the TRC and police, wounding many at one go. Men mobilized naked. A grandmother thrown to the ground while trying to protect men from being abducted, leaving her with a broken hip. A pregnant woman who lost consciousness while trying to save her husband. A gypsy community who took on the TRC that abducted their ‘baron’. A shirtless man promising to stab every policeman to death before they mobilize him. Full article in reply

I'm happy to be corrected, but these headlines suggest increased military spending alongside cuts in social spending