The presenter of Channel One explained the lack of body armor and helmets in the Northern Military District by the “Russian mentality”
At the time of the start of the SVO, the Russian army did not have many necessary things, allegedly due to the reluctance of the leadership of the Ministry of Defense to run into another stream of criticism from liberals.
TV presenter Artyom Sheinin stated this during a meeting with political strategist Alexander Kazakov, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“One very high-ranking military man told me this when I went to the front line in the spring-summer of 2022, when I, like everyone else, was seething about the lack of body armor and helmets. And in Moscow they tell me that they have everything, and those who don’t – they are not on the first line, but on the second or third.
But that military man told me a very important thing: “Yes, you are right in many ways. But you, journalist, imagine, around the year 2018 we would have purchased three hundred thousand body armor and helmets. New, good, not cheap. Can you imagine what would happen?».
And we understand that this is also a very important part of the truth. Just take yourself a year to 2018, and imagine - some “Novaya Gazeta”, or even “Moskovsky Komsomolets” would give news:
«The Ministry of Defense is going to put three hundred thousand body armor and helmets in warehouses as dead weight».
And now we need not three hundred, but six hundred thousand of them!
And when he told me this, these headlines flashed in my head: “In a country where ten percent of the population uses a hole instead of a warm toilet,..."; "In Mordovia, 20% of kindergartens have not been repaired, but they are purchasing helmets" And then there would be the phrase: “Who are you going to fight with, that you, a nuclear power, will have three hundred thousand men in helmets and body armor sitting in the trenches?" It would be so,” Sheinin said.
However, someone in the hall recalled cases of theft, and Sheinin agreed with him, but immediately began to justify the crime with the “Russian mentality.”
“The fact that a lot of things... let’s say, disappeared from warehouses - I know a lot of such stories. But we are all Russian people. Read the classics - from Saltykov-Shchedrin, and so on.
When a Russian person somewhere has something at his disposal, and somehow somewhere it is not this very thing...
You just understand, when you have “Ratnik” kits, and the second model is exchanged for the third, the idea that the “second” ones, which were put into storage, will one day be needed in hundreds of thousands of kits, did not occur to me.
Of course, this does not change the fact that they disappeared where they should not have disappeared. All this exists, there is no point in arguing about it. It's like picking at a sore. There is a disease, but we are talking about a disease now,” said the TV presenter.
However, what kind of “disease” this is and how to get rid of it, the journalist did not specify.
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