Russia is reportedly going to send opera singers, actors, and circus performers to frontlines of its war in Ukraine.
Russian military leadership has announced the formation of a new troupe of creative entertainers – the “front line creatives brigade” – in an attempt to boost soldiers’ notoriously low morale, according to the UK Ministry of Defence and Russian media reports.
The MoD statement said: “Military music and organised entertainment for deployed troops have a long history in many militaries but in Russia they are strongly intertwined with the Soviet-era concept of ideological political education.”
However, it added that the move is “unlikely to substantively alleviate” concerns around poor morale.
RBC News, a Russian outlet, said the brigade will include "professional artists who voluntarily entered military service" as well as troops recently mobilised under Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recruitment drive.
The mood among Russian soldiers is believed to generally be very low. Many troops are sent to battle poorly trained and equipped, with the war grinding on into 2023 despite Putin’s belief that the invasion of Ukraine would happen quickly.
This, along with troop desertion, terrible battlefield conditions and large casualty numbers, have contributed to a bad atmosphere for Russian troops, many of whom are unclear about their objectives. A report for the Institute for the Study of War found that morale was especially bad in the fiercely contested east of Ukraine, in a region known as the Donbas.
Over 9,300 Russian soldiers are estimated to have been killed since the war started in February, according to a report by the BBC and MediaZona, an independent Russian outlet.