More on Troops and Kursk
This particular story has been making the rounds, and several versions exist. The short of it is that it seems these two soldiers caught the commander making some cash on the side selling drugs to the troops. That this is happening is not a particular surprise.
Like all armies, drug use is officially frowned upon in the Russian military. However, like every army at war, let’s say there is some illegal traffic in banned substances. However, usually, commanders engaged in these acts don’t take revenge on troops to the point of getting them killed. So, the story of Ernst and Goodwin has a few interesting twists, especially since they are dead now:
“Don’t go serve in the Ministry of Defense. Never in your life. Especially in the Donetsk mobilization regiments. There’s no place for intelligence here and you won’t achieve anything good here. Your task here is to kick the bucket and make the regiment commander look good when he reports to the top. These are his personal serfs and that’s exactly how he handles them.”
The famous aerial reconnaissance officer Dmitry Lyskovsky, call sign “Goodwin”, author of the Z-channel “North Wind”, and his partner Sergei Gritsai, call sign “Ernest”, recorded a dying video, which they promised to publish if they did not return from the “one-way infantry assault” on which their command sent them.
They did not return from the assault.
In the published videos they described what was happening: along the entire front, lies are the absolute norm, especially about the fact that some settlements are occupied, the regiment commander is expropriating property in the interests of the Donetsk administration, protecting drug trafficking and drug production in the regiment, and the best UAV crew, which regularly supplied information, was eliminated on his orders.
🤷♂️At the same time, “Goodwin” and “Ernest” understood that they were going to storm “one way”, but they decided to go anyway, “after all, there is an oath, there is a homeland, there is a duty, and those like “Evil”, let them live there themselves.”
These two were eliminated on the commander's orders. Drone operators are an important asset to the army. However, the continuation of enrichment schemes is far more critical in the Russian military than these two highly trained soldiers.
So here is Levin’s comment on this, one that tells us a lot about Russia at the moment:
☝🏼That is, they stupidly decided to execute the guys, they found out about it and voluntarily decided to go to their execution, and even emphasized this: like, they are sending us to a place from where we will not return, well, and let the regiment commander “Evil” live on. Yes, they are all fat cats there and also sell drugs, but we will go to die, and let them live.
This is fucking nuts. What kind of wretched and shameful tribe do you have to be to reach such a state? Both “Goodwin” and “Ernst” are not prisoners or the blackness from the depths of the empire that does not see or understand anything beyond its own nose. They are drone operators, specialists, literate and understanding people.
But instead of raising the FPV and smashing this “Evil One”, they, like dumb cattle, voluntarily go to slaughter. No, not even that. Cattle on cattle farms do not know what awaits them, but these two bald monkeys knew very well that the third bald monkey decided to execute them, and with smiles on their faces they agreed to this execution. This is fucking, I have no words.
We have seen a few fragging incidents. Most famously, a tank crew tried to run over their commander early in the war. But for the most part, Russian troops will, more or less, obey orders. Even crazy orders where they expect to die. It’s another marker of the tzar-boyar dynamic that goes back 500 years.
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