By Anna Scherbina

With unbearable sadness, I watch news accounts of the destruction of Kharkov, my birth city in Ukraine, by Russian soldiers wielding weapons, using explosives, and firing missiles. I start every day by checking on family and friends in Ukraine, and listen to their daily accounts of an invading army killing city inhabitants as they sleep. News coverage of the war has been key in shaping the world’s outrage against Putin’s invasion, yet despite a unified global horror at the actions of the Russian aggressors, the Russian people’s attitude to the war remains divided. With that in mind, I share an important story that is missing from the daily coverage, and which if disseminated among Russian families could turn ordinary Russians against the war.

To provide some background: Russia has mandatory military
service, and conscripts make up 30 percent
of the Russian armed forces. The culture of the army is so brutal that even in
times of peace, a new conscript faces high odds that he will suffer a grave injury,
maiming, or even death due to a widespread practice of hazing by older
soldiers. The hazing is called “dedovshina” in Russian. The word is derived
from the Russian word “ded,” meaning grandfather, which refers to the more
seasoned soldiers who routinely torture and humiliate their younger peers.
Dedovshina is so deeply ingrained into the fabric of the Russian (and, before
that, Soviet) army, that parents start to figure out possible ways to avoid the
mandatory service as soon as their sons are born. Some instances of hazing are
so grotesque, they even get coverage in the Western press to the embarrassment of
the Russian army top brass.

Despite all this, high-ranking officers have done little, if anything, to stamp out this brutal tradition since hazing allows commanding officers to maintain a tighter control of their men. While no official statistics are being collected on the hazing-related fatalities, the deaths of young conscripts could number in the thousands each year according to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, a group started more than thirty years ago by the mothers of the soldiers being hazed, to address dedovshina at the grassroots level.

It is easy to see that soldiers are considered highly expendable in Russian military operations. The invasion is poorly planned and, by some reports, up to 6,000 Russian soldiers have already been killed. However, mimicking Soviet tactics used in the 1980s during the war in Afghanistan, the Russian state is keeping mum on the number of Russian casualties. Moreover, according to some reports, Russian soldiers sent to Ukraine were originally told they were only participating in military drills. Thus duped and coerced into participating in the invasion, many are distressed by the atrocities that they are forced to commit.

The West has a rare opportunity to turn the powerful Russian propaganda machine against itself. Putin’s minions are circulating widely on the Russian-speaking corners of the internet a tear-jerking song where a female singer sits next to a Russian Orthodox priest and sings soulfully from the perspective of a fictional Ukrainian soldier asking God for forgiveness for the atrocities he committed in the 2014 Donetsk region conflict. (Inexplicably, the “confession” is sung in Russian, supposedly to be better understood by the song’s intended Russian audience.) Now is the time to bring to the attention of the Russian people the torment of a real-life Russian conscript sent against his will to this senseless and brutal war. We can count on the fearless Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia to help spread the word of their sons’ terrible predicament.

Anna Scherbina, a Ukranian-born economist, is a nonresident senior fellow at AEI and an associate professor of finance at Brandeis University’s International Business School.

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