Notes on the ethnic balance of Russian troops
It says something about how people think of diversity
It's sort of odd to an American, but, an interesting dimension of the composition of Russian armed forces is the ethnic balance of 'cannon fodder' (here, translated as "harm meat", which, thanks, Facebook) versus elite troops that the 24th OMBR is mentioning here.
On the flipside, it probably doesn't occur to people as a potential source of friction inside the Russian military.
I've heard about something like this multiple times now from sources and from reading; I'm good with committing to this being a "thing".
To be 100% fair, this is not a purely Russian problem. America has this too, but the difference with us is, we recognize it for the weakness that it presents and we work on it. So, in June of '21, there looks like there was actually a push to diversify special operations and the military in general after a series of studies found that they were disproportionately white and led by white officers.
I'm not saying this purely just to say "look how reasonable I am, I can point out America's flaws too" (I mean, that, but); I'm also pointing out that this is a pattern across ethnically diverse militaries.
So, the way that it works out for Russian Federation troops seems to be that elite internal regime security troopers and commandos are essentially white people. In-region sources tell me that ROSGVARDIIA are majority white Muscovites - people from the Moscow region. So are FSB Alpha Group.
The conscripts that 24th OMBR here are referring to as "canned meat" here, those are people from minority ethnic groups in Russia, hailing from lesser-developed countries in Russia's orbit, who get conscripted into line units that are thrust into the fight without adequate preparation or training.
Like, the guy trying to break into the Techno House in Ukraine, and failing. That was one of those guys.
This is why, when you look for memorial photos of dead Russian soldiers, so many of them look like Asian or Middle Eastern guys, rather than what you might think of in your head as "Russian" if you're still thinking in terms of 20th century propaganda and movies.
That explains throwing Chechens at Mariupol, but seeing lower-intensity security activities - evacuating refugees, raiding houses, seizing detainees - being conducted by "elite" troopers in places like Kherson or Mykolaiv in the south of the country, or militias in Rubizhne in the east, some of which are documented on my Patreon.
That's what they're talking about here. This is the 24th OMBR, a Ukrainian armored brigade, on Facebook. Quoting Google machine translation:
"These grief-stricken soldiers send divisions of young Mokshans, Buryats, Chukchis, Mordvins, Chechens, and other peoples enslaved by them… And we, Ukrainians, must turn these hordes into mountains of corpses. (Ці горе-вояки відправляють дивізії молодих мокшан, бурят, чукч, мордвинів, чеченців, інших поневолених ними народів… А ми, українці, мусимо перетворювати ці орди на гори трупів.)"
Mokshans are "a Mordvinian ethnic group belonging to the Volgaic branch of the Finno-Ugric peoples. They live in the Russian Federation, mostly near the Volga River and the Moksha River, a tributary of the Oka River" (Wikipedia)
Buryats are the "northernmost of the major Mongol peoples, living south and east of Lake Baikal" (Encyclopedia Britannica).
Mordvins are "a people in European Russia, who speak the Mordvinic languages of the Uralic language family and live mainly in the Republic of Mordovia and other parts of the middle Volga River region of Russia." (Wikipedia)
Chechens are, of course, Chechens.
Stepping back even further at what this means about militaries and the countries they defend, I think it says something particularly interesting about the status of diversity as a raw human factor in assessments of national strength - institutional strength, even.
If you think that this type of ethnic division in forces is a "good idea" at any level, that is being fairly rapidly disproven by Ukraine's army - which also contains, it should be mentioned, a number of women in unacknowledged combat roles, per Molly Olmsted's sources in Slate.
More than simply fairness and, thus, faith in discipline and good order, I think diversity also serves an important practical role in bringing different capabilities and ways of thinking to the fight, and stopping groups of people from falling for manipulative ideologies and extremism.
It's a flaw with the Russian campaign in 2016, if anything; Russia thought that stressing the seams of our ethnic divisions would produce chaos that they could exploit. This explains the Islamic Center protests in Houston, in my opinion.
That was a mistake, in the long run, because diversity is one of our strong suits as a country. It's not a weak spot.
That's why you've got ethnic Korean people out here with multiple cultures' intellectual 'tool kits' pretty much openly hunting Russians to sanction, and waving an American flag while I do so (I'm a citizen, so...)
If diversity is a problem for a low-discipline third-rate army, that actually says more about your army - and your country, by extension - than it says about diversity.