>> The Russian army is unraveling from within, and this collapse is not coming with the breaking of a front or the fall of a capital.
It is coming with something far quieter.
>> >> The positions they have died for over four years, Russian soldiers are now abandoning one by one.
Some retreat, some empty their trenches, and some raise their hands and surrender to a drone.
And the man watching this, Vladimir Putin, is powerless.
He has played every card to stop this erosion.
Money, the threat of prison, barrier troops, foreign mercenaries.
All four backfired.
Putin wanted to deter surrender, but he made it smarter than staying at the front.
In this video, we will follow step by step one of the greatest military erosions in modern history.
How an army loses first its will, then its positions, and finally itself.
Surrender, retreat, abandonment.
The three feed one another.
And the most striking part, the one who set this trap was not Ukraine, but Putin himself.
Before we begin, a small request.
Independent war and technology analysis like this has lately been suppressed by the algorithm.
The video does not reach many of the people who might be interested.
Subscribing, liking the video, and leaving even a single word of comment beneath it directly helps us break through that suppression.
It takes only a few seconds.
Let’s begin.
Let us look from the most visible face of this unraveling, surrender.
A Russian soldier crawls out a slab of concrete and raises his hands to show he wants to surrender.
The Ukrainian drone hovering over him does not open fire.
Instead, it drops a water bottle and a note beside the trench.
Follow the drone.
>> >> The soldier stands up, and guided by the drone, walks across the open ground toward the Ukrainian line.
This is not an isolated scene, but a method.
In another clip, a drone pilot from the Skala Regiment switches on loudspeaker mode and calls down from the sky to a Russian soldier, “Surrender.
Everything will be fine.
” >> >> The soldier drops his weapon and walks to the Ukrainian positions with his hands up.
>> >> A state project called “I Want to Live”, set up to make all this easier, takes it a step further.
It shows the way to surrender by phone or through a Telegram chatbot, simplifies the message with animated videos.
“Drop your weapon, raise your hands, follow the drone.
” And it speaks directly to the Russian soldier, >> >> “Choose life.
” The scale confirms it.
Set up in 2022, the project has, according to released data, been visited more than 48 million times, most from within Russia, and received tens of thousands of applications.
About 10,000 mobilized soldiers applied to surrender.
And this is no longer just a phone line.
According to Ukrainian Defense Minister Fedorov, over a single winter, more than 100 Russian soldiers surrendered directly to drones.
Sometimes there is not even a human across from them, and they raise their hands before an armed ground robot.
So, the drone is now a tool not only for striking targets, but for taking surrenders.
And it is not only Russians surrendering.
According to Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, more than 28,000 foreigners recruited into Russian ranks, lured with fake job ads and pushed to the front, have been identified.
>> Peru.
Zimbabwe.
Burundi.
>> Some of those captured on the Kharkiv front belong to this nameless legion.
We will return to this story shortly.
Of course, not everyone chooses to surrender.
When Ukraine’s Eighth Special Operations Regiment raided a Russian position in Donetsk, the enemy refused to surrender.
The operators moved in, one Russian soldier was killed, two were captured, and the team provided aid to the prisoners and withdrew without losses.
The one who refuses ends in a firefight.
The one who surrenders has a chance ahead.
And this difference is pushing ever more soldiers onto the second path.
When you lay all of this side by side, the picture becomes even more striking.
According to leaked Russian Defense Ministry documents, the number of those who have deserted the army since the start of the war is approaching 50,000.
The desertion and unauthorized absence cases opened have passed 20,000.
Add to that the tens of thousands who applied to I want to live to surrender, those who surrendered to drones and special units, and those taken prisoner.
The categories differ, but they all point in one direction.
The will to stay at the front unraveling not one by one, but on a scale of tens of thousands.
Let us move to the second link in the chain, retreat.
And at exactly this point, Putin’s own decision fans the flames.
With its deep strikes, Ukraine has squeezed Russia into a dilemma.
Either protect your soldier at the front or protect your image in Moscow and Crimea.
For a dictator, that is an easy choice.
According to Ukrainian intelligence, Russia is pulling air defense systems from the front and massing them on the capital Moscow, on the Kerch Bridge, and on Valdai, where one of Putin’s residences sits.
According to Zelenskyy, hundreds of launchers were shifted to the Moscow region alone, and about 90 launchers to Valdai from other regions.
And pulling back air defense is the first link in an inevitable chain.
This blunts not only Russia’s defense, but also its offense.
Russia had been advancing in this war with glide bombs.
Its aircraft flew behind their own air defense shield and dropped these bombs, and Ukrainian fighters could not enter that range.
Once the shield is pulled back, Russian aircraft can no longer be as effective.
The timing is also a disaster for Russia.
Ukraine is now fielding its own glide bombs and adding Swedish-made Gripen fighters to its inventory.
If these aircraft approach the front at exactly the weakest moment of Russian air defense, a brand new door opens for Ukraine to break through the line.
The equivalent on the ground is very concrete.
Once the shield is pulled back, the soldier is defenseless even in his own trench.
Moreover, the same gap lets Ukrainian drones hunt almost freely behind the front.
Ukrainian drone pilots say that in some occupied areas, there is almost no Russian air defense left across from them.
The same gap that cuts off resupply also leaves the trench undefended.
For a unit that has lost its security and its resupply, the logic of staying in position disappears.
And here surrender moves up a level.
First individual soldiers, then small groups, begin pulling the line back.
And in making this choice, Russia gives away something else.
Which battery it takes from where and puts where actually shows what it cares about.
Ukraine reads this like intelligence.
Furthermore, pulling back the shield opens not only the front, but the rear as well, which is perhaps even more important.
Ukraine’s logistics blockade works in exactly this gap.
Once drones are free behind the front, the fuel, ammunition, and food heading to the front are cut off before they can even set out.
And there is the other side of the coin.
Once Russian aircraft are neutralized in those areas, the area Ukraine has to defend also shrinks.
>> >> So, with a single move, the door it can attack through opens and the ground it must guard at its back shrinks.
And this is the final link in the chain.
Retreat turns into the abandonment of positions.
And when you combine all of this into a single picture, a trap emerges.
Ukraine strikes Moscow and Crimea.
Russia panics and shifts its air defense there.
This opens the front.
Ukraine presses the front.
Russia this time pulls the systems back to the front, but this leaves exposed the places it had just protected.
Ukraine strikes there again.
The cycle runs back and forth until Russia decides to sit down at the table.
>> >> For a soldier whose security has been withdrawn, whose resupply has been cut, and for whom surrender has already become rational, there is no need even to wait for a Ukrainian assault.
Some positions can empty out with no one attacking.
When one person gets up and leaves, the others notice, and then a whole line melts.
>> >> Even if Ukraine does launch an assault, this time it has behind it an air support that Russians often do not have, and ground robots.
At some points, without a single round being fired, hands go up in front of a mere robot.
And these three stages, surrender, retreat, abandonment, feed one another.
Every surrender video breaks the next soldier’s courage.
Every empty trench leaves the one beside it defenseless.
The unraveling advances not one by one, but in waves.
And where and how the war is fought is now decided by Ukraine.
It is hard to overstate the importance of this picture.
Ukraine is in fact pressing Russia on its soft underbelly.
Instead of hitting the front where it is strongest, it breaks the balances that hold it up and leaves the body exposed.
And this time it holds a card it never had before.
Throughout this war, neither side had established superiority in the air.
Now, with air defense pulled from the front, that balance is tilting against Russia for the first time.
Add ground robots to that, machines that advance without risking a single soldier, and can even take surrenders without firing a single round.
For a Russian position stripped of its shield and cut off from resupply, this is from any angle a dead end.
If you have come this far, liking the video and writing your thoughts beneath it helps this analysis reach many more people.
>> >> If you are not subscribed, subscribe because now we are going to look at why all this unraveling resembles a collapse that happened exactly 100 years ago in 1917.
If all this feels familiar, there is a reason.
Historians follow a pattern when reading an army’s collapse from within.
The pattern seen in the disintegration of the Tsarist army in 1917.
First, the breaking of morale, then mass desertion, then fraternization with the enemy, then the collapse of the front, and finally political upheaval.
>> >> Some analysts looking at today’s picture say the first three of these five stages are already visible.
Morale is collapsing, desertion is breaking records, surrender and fraternization videos are multiplying.
The last two stages are still open-ended.
But the third stage, fraternization with the enemy, is perhaps the most dangerous.
The moment a soldier is convinced the other side will not kill him, the will to fight unravels completely.
And the I want to live project targets exactly this psychology.
>> >> The scale also weighs on this picture.
By one estimate, in December 2025, Russia suffered more losses than the Soviet Union did in a decade in Afghanistan.
And the Kremlin is completely silent on this.
>> >> It has never officially released desertion figures, and 17 generals were dismissed, but no reason was given.
An army usually wears down not in a single moment, but through cracks that accumulate quietly and then accelerate.
And this silence is itself a confession that the problem is too big to admit.
So, what is the driving force behind all these surrenders and escapes? On one side, a human calculation, On the other, cold arithmetic.
First, the human calculation.
Even on a good day, the Russian soldier in the trench is underfed, under-equipped, and if he goes on the attack, will most likely lose his life.
As we just described, once the shield is pulled back, he is not safe even in his own trench, and no resupply reaches the trench.
He has three roads ahead.
Retreating is often deadly because of the barrier troops.
Attacking forward is two, and surrendering at least offers a chance of survival.
It is not hard to guess what a person will choose.
>> >> Now, the arithmetic.
In the first half of 2026, the Russian army, according to Ukrainian General Staff figures, lost more than 160,000 soldiers, killed or too badly wounded to fight.
But the real issue is not that number.
It is being unable to replace it.
According to CSIS data, while monthly losses in 2026 rose above 30,000, monthly recruitment stayed at about 27,000.
So, Russia can no longer fill what it loses.
The figures confirm it.
While Russia’s daily recruitment target is 1,100 to 1,150, the actual figure is about 940 a day.
At this pace, the shortfall reaches 65,000 by year’s end.
And perhaps most striking, in April and May, Russia lost more territory than it gained.
The first monthly net territorial loss since 2024.
The loss equation is breaking down in quality as well.
Ukrainian drones now hit not only soldiers, but medical evacuation vehicles.
The wounded cannot be evacuated and die.
The army’s tooth-to-tail balance is collapsing.
As combat soldiers dwindle, the cook and the technician are forced to fight.
The result is an army eating its own tail, unable to renew itself.
To reverse this math, Putin tried four things in turn.
All four backfired.
First, money.
The contract bonus was quadrupled to about 1 million rubles.
For men from the poorest regions, it was life-changing money.
And it worked for a while.
But as news of death from the front spread, it lost its appeal.
Moreover, an unexpected side effect emerged.
Soldiers who took the bonus and fled.
When money did not hold, fear was tried.
Up to 16 years in prison for surrender and desertion.
But when a soldier at the front faces the dilemma of 16 years in prison or staying at the front, most choose prison.
Some even formally work to get themselves imprisoned.
Deterrence turned into the exact opposite of what was intended.
Third, barrier troops.
Chechen units tasked with shooting those who retreat.
But this too often pushed the soldier not backward, but forward to surrender to Ukraine.
And fourth, the most bitter, foreigners.
According to the Center for Countering Disinformation, there are more than 28,000 recruited foreigners in Russian ranks.
Lured with fake job ads, their documents are confiscated and they are thrown, unprepared, into human wave tactics.
>> >> The confession of Uganda’s Richard Akantorana sums up the whole crisis in one sentence.
They told me it was a work contract and sent me to the front.
The irony is this.
While trying to deter surrender, Putin achieved the opposite.
Once the reality of the penal battalion reached the front, the soldier did the math.
If you go back to Russia, a penal battalion and great risk.
Staying at the front, the same.
But on the Ukrainian side, a chance of survival.
And this loss has another unseen face, ethnic fracture.
The losses go not to Moscow or Petersburg, but to the poorest regions like Buryatia, Tuva, and Dagestan.
With every loss at the front, this grows a quiet engine of discontent inside the country.
>> >> Families searching for their lost soldier are often turned away with, “We have no information.
” And in cities like Samara, women have demanded Putin’s resignation.
It must be said honestly, this does not mean Russia will collapse tomorrow.
Russia still leans on a vast pool of manpower and continues to strike cities, but the cost is astronomical.
According to CSIS, since February 2022, the Russian army’s losses have approached 1 and 1/2 million soldiers, and the number of those killed nearly 450,000.
Carnegie’s Michael Kofman’s caution is also apt.
These methods alone do not bring an operational solution, but a power backed into a corner usually does not step back.
It tries to regain the initiative it has lost by raising the risk elsewhere.
That is why the coming period may even be the most dangerous phase of the war.
One last detail completes the irony of this picture.
Even with layer upon layer of air defense around Moscow, Ukraine can slip inside and hit targets like the Moscow refinery.
Indeed, according to one claim, that striking refinery explosion was caused not by a Ukrainian drone, but by a Russian air defense missile that missed its target.
If true, it means Putin, by massing his shield on the capital, cannot even protect it from his own weapon.
In the end, the barometer of a war is neither the number of tanks nor the map.
That barometer is will.
The Russian soldier’s will to stay at the front is melting at a pace that begins with individual surrenders and extends to the abandonment of positions.
And money, fear, barrier troops, and foreign soldiers cannot refill that will.
The most striking part of the story is that Putin built this cycle with his own hands.
While trying to deter surrender, he made surrender rational and staying in position meaningless.
>> >> So, what do you think about this topic? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
