Talk:Ghost soldiers

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Historical context

This article is very focused on recent events. "Ghost" soldiers were known in previous times as dead-pays or mort-pays and were a common phenomenon in the 16th century, being on occassion regularised to an allowance of a number of deadpays to top up commanders salaries. There are plenty of RS sources referring to the practice which could be used to improve the article. Monstrelet (talk) 08:56, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Monstrelet for this info. I created this "Start" to provide context to the recent fall of Afghanistan. I expanded with Iraq pre-2013, a well known case. I did not search academic litterature (google scholar), only news. It was obvious this corruption trick must be older, but this expansion will be for someone else to push. Identifying those key words (dead-pays, mort-pays) will be super helpful for later contributors. Yug (talk) 13:44, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Ghost soldiers in Russia

There is a video circulating on twitter of Yevgeny Prigozhin (at 0'57"), before his Wagner Group rebellion, making a statement characteristic of the practice of Ghost soldiers, stating :

« In this LPR and RPR there were the Army Corps, which, in case of attack by Ukrainians, were meant to give a response. However, these [Army Corps] didn't exist. In reality, there was a minimal number of solidiers, and a certain number of generals were simply stealing the money. Wikth a salary of 40k, 20k would stay at the [commander], 20k would be given to the soldiers who signed the contract, there was no training, while the generals were simply getting money for these dead soul and the budget were stolen. »

This is quite meaningful, confirming earlier foreign analysis of systemic corruptions, overestimate and lack of human resources and materials. I looked for English language journalistic source citing this Prigozhin statement but found nothing online. Can I cite the videos via the tweet ? How should I proceed ? Yug (talk) 🐲 17:34, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

References