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Two Russian drone operators said their officer assigned them to an infantry assault after a quarrel.
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They died soon after, igniting a frenzy of criticism from pro-war Russian commentators.
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The Russian Defense Ministry said days later that it would investigate their deaths.
The deaths of two seasoned Russian drone operators in Ukraine have stirred a frenzy among pro-Kremlin military bloggers, who say the specialists were sent to fight as regular infantrymen.
In a video recorded before their deaths, both operators said they were assigned to a suicide mission with an assault unit as punishment for arguing with their commander.
The clip of the specialists — Dmitry “Goodwin” Lysakovsky and Sergei “Ernest” Gritsai — was published posthumously, appearing on Friday on the Telegram channel “North Wind.“
The footage has since circulated widely on Russian Telegram channels, which identified the soldiers as members of the 87th Rifle Regiment fighting near Pokrovsk in Donetsk.
Lysakovsky and Gritsai accused their new commander, Igor Puzyk, of disbanding their drone squad after they quarreled with him and filtering their team members into infantry platoons.
They further alleged that Puzyk had facilitated drug trafficking in his unit and falsely reported battlefield gains under his command.
Lysakovsky recorded a separate video message in which he profusely criticized Puzyk and claimed that the commander was being influenced by a soldier who kept ties with Ukrainian intelligence.
“Lies is an absolute norm,” Lysakovsky said, per a translation by Estonian analyst WarTranslated.
A very curious incident occurred for Russians in the Pokrovsk direction. We’ve all heard when Russians send specialists like UAV operators and tankmen into meat assaults. In this case, one operator recorded a video before his death…1/ pic.twitter.com/b893g7mF3w
— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated) September 13, 2024
“I’m recording this in case I don’t come back from assault, and only then this message will have any weight,” Lysakovsky added.
He later said in another video that he was about to leave to “storm” with his infantry unit and called on Russian men not to join the war.
“Your task is to die here so that the regiment commander, reporting to the higher-ups, looks good,” he said. “These are his personal serfs.”
These two videos featuring him were also published by “North Wind” on Friday.
Past Russian media reports suggest that Lysakovsky was well-known even before the Ukraine war, writing that he was a lawyer and financier who was fighting for the Donetsk People’s Republic, a separatist faction in Ukraine, as early as 2014.
He became the head of the DPR’s aerial reconnaissance unit by 2016, per a report that year by Kommersant, which said he was charged with corporate raiding in Moscow.
As for Gritsai, Russian military bloggers who claimed to personally know him reported that he was a career officer.
In their joint video complaint, the two men said they complied with their commander’s orders because they had taken an “oath to the Motherland.”
Russian backlash and an official response
The footage sparked an outcry over the weekend among Russian military bloggers, many of whom independently reported that the two men had been killed in battle.
Part of the backlash stems from assessments by on-the-ground pundits that Lysakovsky and Gritsai had been two of the best drone operators at the frontline.
Several posted screenshots of Russian text messages, in which Lysakovsky asked for help with transferring out of his unit.
“There are no supplies, no maps, no plans of minefields. Nothing,” Lysakovsky wrote in a message dated September 10.
Dozens of Russian commentators have blasted the circumstances of the deaths, with some calling for a ban on assigning specialists like snipers or drone operators to infantry assaults.
“The very fact of repurposing an effective UAV reconnaissance crew into assault infantry in the current conditions is, to put it mildly, sabotage,” wrote Russian pro-Kremlin journalist Alexander Kots.
The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed the deaths of Gritsei and Lysakovsky on Sunday, writing that it would investigate their demise.
The probe would be run under the “personal control” of Viktor Goremykin, a deputy defense minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s armed forces, the ministry said in its statement.
Some of the furor has calmed since the announcement. However, several prominent bloggers continued expressing concern over what they say is a rising occurrence of Russian commanders wasting valuable specialists on frontal assaults.
Political commentator Svyatoslav Golikov wrote that the problem had become “systematic” in the military due to manpower shortages on the battlefield.
“This particular issue will be sorted out. But only because it raised a fuss,” wrote the Telegram channel Two Majors.
The Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
Pokrovsk, the city near which Lysakovsky and Gritsai were deployed, has been a focal point and a source of much bloodshed on Ukraine’s eastern front.
Russian troops have been pushing hard to take the logistics hub in recent months, nearing the outskirts of the city after weeks of slow advance.
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