Ukraine: military (Aug '14 to mid-June '15) closed

[Firn]

http://www.mamasoldata.org/

so comrade read it and weep for the countless killed Russian soldiers who were buried in unmarked graves or in the middle of the night or not buried at all while their bodies lay somewhere in the Ukraine not recovered-AND never received compensation because they were not in a "war" where they?

There certainly seems to be a rather high percentage of those Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine are from the VDV which is hardly a surprise considering it's status and use in recent conflicts. It is quite likely that of those and outsized number served in the rapid reaction battallions.

The 100+ pages of Russia's New Army are now four years old but offers some basic insight :

In order to improve the VDV divisions’ and the single VDV brigade’s rapid reaction capability, each has been given a rapid reaction battalion.

Up to 70 per cent of these battalions’ servicemen are professional soldiers many of them have real combat experience. The VDV Command is clearly aware of the shortcomings of the current system, whereby the rest of the units are manned predominantly by conscripts. But concentrating most of the available professional soldiers in the rapid reaction battalions results in a clear disparity in the standards of combat training within the VDV divisions and brigades.

All in all it seems that the Russian invasion and fighting has mostly been executed by the steel tip of a spear with a rather weak wooden shaft against an army which has been neglected and stripped for over two decades.