U.S. Scribe Held By Russians For 2 Weeks Says Invasion Failed

On March 4, Breaking Defense correspondent Reuben Johnson was captured by Russian soldiers outside of Kyiv who ambushed his car and taken prisoner for two weeks, in the process learning why the invaders are bound to lose in Ukraine.

Photo Insert: Russian troops are reportedly abandoning their tanks and fighting vehicles as they are hungry and deprived of supplies - worse, being threatened with death by their commanders should they leave the battlefield.

Johnson said his captors were demoralized as they were told the adventure would be over in five days. They were bitter and that their superiors “had no concept of what the Ukrainians’ true capabilities were.”

Russian troops are also abandoning their tanks and fighting vehicles as they are hungry and deprived of supplies. Worse, Johnson said, their commanders threaten to kill anyone leaving the battlefield.

He noted the lower-ranked Russians complained that Moscow has no rational or defined objectives in Ukraine and could not justify the invasion of Ukraine.

Officers still accept Putin’s victimhood narrative, all because of sustained propaganda and not because Russia’s three losses in its past five wars were due to Moscow’s errors, as when the Finns inflicted more fatalities on Russia’s military but caved in only after losing 1% of its army daily during the 1939 Winter War and when Japan destroyed a Russian fleet in the 1904-1905 war as well as when the Afghans forced the Red Army to withdraw after a bruising 10-year war.

“The sum total of the party line justifying the invasion: the entire world has been against Russia and for centuries there is not a single nation which has not caused harm to the nation and its people. Therefore, it has become necessary to ‘demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine’ in order to prevent ‘genocide by the Kyiv regime.’ (This pretzel logic justification conveniently ignores that the democratically elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and that several of his relatives perished in the Holocaust),” Johnson argued.

“Whatever insights I may have gained from my two weeks of captivity weren’t worth the nightmares and memories I’ll never quite get rid of. But they did give me a chance to understand the reality for Russian forces on the ground. And the reality is this: the invasion has been nothing short of a disaster, and the only way out is for Ukraine to continue to roll back Moscow’s ambitions,” he concluded.

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