RUSSIAN FORCES 'ON BRINK OF COLLAPSE' AS SOLDIERS FACE 'UKRAINE SYNDROME' AFTER WAR
Vladimir Putin is reportedly struggling to convince more soldiers to join his forces and ignoring the long-term effects of his draconian military rules, according to a defence analyst. According to American defence analyst Dara Massicot, Russia's military will face mass PTSD problems and a mental health crisis as soon as the war in Ukraine is over.
Writing for The Economist, she said: "Russia's wartime military-personnel policies, instituted last September, temporarily prohibit active-duty and mobilised soldiers from leaving service. Russia faces a crisis in military retention and a larger social crisis of veteran mental-health disorders when these restrictions are lifted."
She added: "Russian forces have sustained more casualties in the past 16 months than in a decade of war in Afghanistan in the 1980s or two campaigns in Chechnya in the 1990s. Casualty estimates vary, from official Russian numbers from late last year (just under 6,000 killed in action), to more than 23,000 confirmed military funerals, according to the BBC and Mediazona, to Western military estimates of 40,000-60,000 killed in action with 100,000-140,000 wounded.
"The higher estimates are staggering figures, with enormous implications for the future of Russian military power and for Russian society."
Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing a new unexpected enemy - his once close ally, Moscow caterer and owner of the Wagner mercenary forces Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Massicot claimed that despite Kremlin's efforts to provide some assistance to veterans coming back from the war, the country still lacks the necessary facilities to cope with the large scale of personnel expected to suffer from "Ukraine syndrome".
She said: "Russian psychologists estimate that more than 100,000 veterans will need professional help to cope with mental-health disorders from the war. Russia does not have anywhere near enough psychiatric facilities for this number: it has only ten veterans' hospitals, according to veterans' advocates, and only one of them, with just 32 beds, focuses on psychiatric rehabilitation.
"Some soldiers are sent to military-vacation sanatoriums that lack the staff and facilities needed to treat them. Some of them reportedly buy alcohol off-site, withdraw to their rooms and drink alone."
READ MORE: Nuclear catastrophe feared as Russia prepares for Ukraine counteroffensive
The stark warning to Putin comes as Ukrainian forces accused Russia of blowing up a major dam and hydroelectric power station in a part of southern Ukraine that Russia controls, sending water gushing from the breached facility and risking massive flooding. Ukrainian authorities ordered hundreds of thousands of residents downriver to evacuate.
Russian officials countered that the Kakhovka dam was damaged by Ukrainian military strikes in the contested area.
The fallout could have broad consequences: Flooding homes, streets and businesses downstream; depleting water levels upstream that help cool Europe's largest nuclear power plant; and draining supplies of drinking water to the south in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed.
The dam break added a complex new element to Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine, now in its 16th month, as Ukrainian forces were widely seen to be moving forward with a long-anticipated counteroffensive in patches along more than 1,000-kilometres of frontline in the east and south of Ukraine.
Ukraine's nuclear operator Energoatom said in a Telegram statement that the blowing up of the dam "could have negative consequences for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant," near the dam, but at the moment situation is "controllable."
Videos posted online began testifying to the spillover: One showed floodwaters inundating a long roadway, another showed a beaver scurrying for high ground from rising waters.
Zelenskyy called an emergency meeting to deal with the crisis, Ukrainian officials said.