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Russian officer "Colonel Shuvalov" described on Telegram how it is encouraged to fabricate reports about destroyed Ukrainian equipment by filming strikes on different days using various weapons and equipment. This is done to please the upper leadership since everyone benefits from positive reports and inflated numbers. It's a long post but worth reading (source: https://t.me/shouvalov/33) "When civilians are surprised by Lancets and Krasnopols attacking enemy decoys, that’s normal. But when people who at least served conscript service are surprised by it (and even more so they ridicule it), then you should also be surprised. The Soviet system of military service (which we have morally preserved) is very simple. The primary desire for a military man is to make something go boom, let's be honest. The more modern and powerful the available weapons are, the greater the internal need to boom them. The category "expensive" in military psychology is not applicable if it is not coming from your salary. The second point are the reports. You can know for sure that you are hitting a decoy, and not the enemy’s vehicle, you can suspect this, but if the decoy as a whole is not bad and suits you for a report, then you hit it and report about success to the top. Any Soviet officer (whom many people f*p on today) would have done just that. Because the army is simple. Because your report about the hit target (especially a “fat” one) is a joy for you, and for the authorities, and for the authorities of the authorities. But if you give an “All Clear” and write a dull report that "the detected target turned out to be false and it seemed inappropriate to hit it because of the need to save precision-guided ammunition," then you will become an a*shole for both the authorities and fellow officers. And for all of them, you will be “not really military.” How is this problem solved by the enemy? Their "Western specialists" got control over the targets. They did not try to break the established psychotype of the Soviet officer school (Ukrainian officers, especially the older ones, remained Soviet in their psychotype, there’s nowhere for anything else to come from), they simply took control, removing the motivation to create false reports. A kind of substitution of the military classics for a business approach. But we're not only hitting wooden models. Now I’ll say a vile and unpopular thing, but let at least one active officer point that out if I’m lying: before, and after the appearance of Western military equipment - in general, a very popular way to give a good result upwards is to beautifully fire at the enemy’s already destroyed equipment. Bradley, that was ATGMed yesterday, today can be beautifully fired at from helicopters, and tomorrow you can hit it from self-propelled guns. With video recording, reports, and all the right angles. So this becomes not one, but three wrecked Bradleys. Since the political leadership is demanding a specific report, the General Staff will demand such a report too. And the military will solve it the way they know how - in a military way. I won't list specific examples, but everyone in the army knows perfectly well what I'm talking about. This is not exotic, this is already a mass practice. Exotic is to make an order for a service of designing pictures a video of an objective control of a battle. You give an acquaintance a video and a photo of a wrecked MTLB, you give him a task, and he returns high-quality pictures to you, where instead of an MTLB there is a tank or self-propelled guns, next to which there are several wrecked infantry fighting vehicles. But in the army itself, no one will ever try and fight this, and it is stupid to scold the General Staff or the minister. Some external solution is needed. Something similar to how the targets of the Ukrainians are controlled by Western instructors. Because for the military, everything that I mentioned above is, as it were, not a crime, and not even a “Zalyot” [i.e. blunder]. “Zalyot” is when you were caught doing this, but caught in such a way that you could not get yourself out. Passing out the John Deere harvesters as Leopards was, of course, an oversight, but even then they got away. Although this should be punished three times, primarily those who were stupid enough to create this setup and get caught. And the rest ... The political leadership has its own universe, from which it gives orders and instructions to the military leadership. The military leadership already has its own universe, very different. And it gives instructions down and reports up, based on its vision of the situation. At the bottom - there is generally a harsh reality, but its adjusted for military perception. The necessary reports are required from you in the universe of military leadership, and if reality does not correspond to it, these are problems of reality. You're an officer, you can do it."
