By Bond Robertson 
Putin is an idiot. He wants to take Kyiv, but we can’t do that.”
It is a quote from a Russian soldier in a telephone conversation in Ukraine, he writes The New York Times. The newspaper will receive thousands of phone calls as of March this year from the bombed-out town of Bucha outside the capital, Kyiv. Soldiers defied orders and made calls from their cell phones to friends and family.
Avisa states that they received calls from the Ukrainian government.
In the conversations, it turned out that many were sent to Ukraine without knowing that they were going there.
Nobody told us we were going to war. They warned us the day before we left,” a Russian soldier told his mother.
Another soldier says they “cheated like a little kid” to a friend:
“We were all training for two or three days.”
– well-known practice
Retired Lieutenant Colonel Arne Bord told Dagbladet that sending soldiers into battle without their knowledge was a well-known Russian practice.
There were many examples of this when Russia was at war in Afghanistan. There, officers up to the rank of colonel were not informed that they were on their way to battle. Dallhog says they landed the plane in Afghanistan, not knowing they were on their way there.
In addition, there are many soldiers who are particularly poorly trained for war, telephone conversations indicate. Dallhog believes the conversations appear credible.
– There are soldiers who have arrived on the front lines who have ever had or never had any training, says Dalhaug.
– Bombed by them
In the phone calls, which the New York Times spent two months making, soldiers complained of strategic errors and shortages of supplies. Plus, they’re not making headway on the battlefield.
“We can’t take Kyiv… We just take the villages and that’s it.” Says the soldier.
“Our position is nonsense, literally. We have taken a defensive position. Our attack has been halted.”
One of them says that they were bombed by their forces:
“Our damned forces bombed us. They thought we were silly [ukrainere]. …we thought we were done with it. “
– You are completely wrong
There are many hadiths that indicate that Russian soldiers do not believe in victory.
A soldier named “Ilya” asks his partner what Putin is saying and everything is said to be going according to plan and schedule. Then the soldier replies:
“He is wrong.”
Dalhaug believes it is well known that morale was weak among the Russian forces from the start.
– We know that those who fought in Ukraine did so for money. So most of the people who have been drawn into the war are poor Russians who have been given a large sum of money and don’t know what to do with it, says Dalhaug.
Russian President Vladimir Putin chose to send additional troops to Ukraine last week when he deployed 300,000 reservists.
– Those who are sent now don’t even get the money. They never imagined going there. So we can expect their morale to be lower, says Dahlhog.
Affects areas under stress
On Friday, Putin is expected to announce the merger of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as the Russian-occupied regions of the Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions of the Russian Federation.
Dalhaug believes that this is only an attempt to raise morale in Russia.
– It will not change the situation on the ground in Ukraine. Indeed, Russia will celebrate that it will take over regions already under severe pressure. In a few days, many of the areas they say they will annex may already be lost to Ukraine, the lieutenant-general says.
The Kremlin announces the annexation
Dallhog believes that morale is bad not only among the troops, but also in the country.
– There were surprisingly large protests against bringing in reservists. He asserts that the Russians’ support for the war was shallow. Now that the Russians are beginning to understand the consequences of the war, the support isn’t that great, he says.