Every soldier in the regular Russian army is issued with a saperka, a short-handled spade with three sharp edges that is is used by the infantry for digging foxholes and other defensive earthworks.
Recruits to the Spetsnaz — Russia’s famed special forces units — are also issued with the saperka. But the Spetsnaz don’t do static defence, only attack. For them the spade, like any other hard, portable object, is a lethal weapon. In training they are taught how to kill with it, whether launched at an opponent like a tomahawk or in hand-to-hand combat.
There are few limits in this training. One account even told of individual recruits being locked in a windowless room with a maddened dog. The soldier is armed only with his vicious little shovel. The brief: kill or be killed.
Recruits to the Spetsnaz — Russia’s famed special forces units — have to undergo extreme training to graduate
The rabid dog is just one of several brutal tests the salagi or ‘small fry’ are said to undergo, as they are ‘blooded’ in the realities of irregular warfare, Spetsnaz-style.
As a weapon, novichok is some distance removed from the saperka.
But at least one of the men who used the nerve agent against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in March was a veteran Spetsnaz operative, we are now told.
The suggestion is that it was a revenge hit against a traitorous comrade — Sergei Skripal was an officer of the Spetsnaz’s parent organisation when he defected to the West. And so a new chapter is added to the already lurid Spetsnaz legend; one of half-crazed supermen carrying out impossible missions that would make even SAS troopers wilt.
Spetsnaz is a composite word, a contraction of the Russian phrase spetsialnoye nazhacheniye, meaning ‘special purpose’.
As Mark Galeotti says in his 2015 book on them, their ‘specialness’ is not so much to do with the high calibre of the individual soldiers, as in Western special forces, but in the particular roles their units perform.
The rabid dog is just one of several brutal tests the salagi or ‘small fry’ are said to undergo, as they are ‘blooded’ in the realities of irregular warfare, Spetsnaz-style
Though the Spetsnaz formally came into being in 1950, their history can be traced back to World War II, when airborne shock troops were deployed to fight and disrupt the enemy far behind their front lines.
This was the raison d’etre of the SAS too. Yet the Spetsnaz is not a stand-alone unit of the regular army like the celebrated British regiment, but part of the GRU — Russia’s military intelligence directorate.
In the Cold War, the Spetsnaz’s job would have been to infiltrate and attack key targets and individuals in the West, shortly before or after conventional warfare had begun. Nato’s tactical nuclear weapons were a priority. This entailed a good deal of preliminary subterfuge.
‘In West Germany in the 1980s we used to find them driving around in articulated lorries with a [Russian] general in the passenger seat,’ one former UK special forces officer recalls. ‘Of course they were doing reconnaissance for war.
‘I remember one time we picked up one of the divisional commanders of the Soviet Third Shock Army in a lorry supposedly delivering sausages. He had a Spetsnaz driver, of course.’
As Soviet fortunes waned, so did those of the Spetsnaz.
In the wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan they were often used as regular infantrymen. But with the ascendance of President Putin, the Spetsnaz units have had a renaissance. Today they are at the heart of the new Russian form of warfare, based on speed and deception rather than the old Soviet tactic of mass formations of dubious quality.
Spetsnaz have deployed under false flags in Ukraine’s civil war and were the ‘little green men’ — the un-badged, unidentified and deniable but well-equipped soldiers who were the military face of Putin’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014.
Recruits are asked to do nearly physically impossible things with repeatable accuracy. This particular training exercise forces recruits to do a flip over a barbed wire fence while throwing a hatchet at a target
They are a presence, of course, in Syria — in Aleppo I met tough guys in Syrian Army uniforms who spoke to locals in heavily Russian-accented English. They were Spetsnaz. They are even on Britain’s streets. Disruption in the ‘enemy’ heartland remains a key role.
How good are they really?
Of the ‘15-17,000’ Spetsnaz officers and men currently serving, as many as 30 per cent are still conscripts, rather than the ruthlessly hand-picked volunteer professional soldiers of the SAS or American Delta Force.
Only a tiny fraction of the Spetsnaz are likely to be comparable in quality to their Western special forces counterparts. Nevertheless, the Spetsnaz units get the pick of the military draft and all recruits have to pass gruelling tests in endurance — the ability to evade a numerically superior enemy on foot is a key to their role — aggression and intelligence in order to be accepted. A three-kilometre run has to be completed in 12 minutes, for example; a five-kilometre cross-country run in 26 minutes and the 100 metres in 13 seconds.
There are standard fitness tests. For the cameras, recruits will also run over burning coals, smash wooden blocks and show off in other extreme ways. But there are also more baroque psychological tests which are less well publicised by the Spetsnaz PR people.
Initiation rituals are common. Former Soviet officer Victor Suvorov, who defected to the West, wrote of the first night on base of some Spetsnaz recruits towards the end of the Cold War: ‘All the young recruits would get beaten. And they would be beaten on the following nights. ‘They would be driven out into the mud barefoot, and made to sleep in the lavatories (standing up or lying down, as you wish). They would be beaten with belts, slippers and spoons — anything suitable for causing pain.’
Then there were the alleged methods to familiarise recruits with killing. The Spetsnaz have their own martial art called Sambo (another contraction, of samooborona bez oruzhiya, meaning ‘self-defence without weapons’).
Originally inspired by judo and jujitsu, it is a vicious form of no-holds-barred street fighting in which recruits are trained to use anything from broken bottles to street signs.
Sergey Badyuk, a Spetsnaz instructor, recalled: ‘Our motto is something like “only idiots are fighting with their bare hands”.
‘In addition to the usual training we also practise a lot of “exercises on boldness”. For example, a large rat was driven into the bath and a naked fighter was pushed in after it. When a rat is cornered, it will attack. If you can kill a rat with your bare hands, then you are not afraid of humans any longer.’
He added: ‘During the practice of hand-to-hand combat, there is always blood, sergeants intentionally cause injuries. The fighter must get used to the blood.’
Suvorov wrote of one particularly gory test in which recruits were chased by an attack dog into the cellar of a ruined house.
Young soldiers are put through a harsh series of exercises, from taking full-force punches in the chest from their commanding officers without flinching, to getting burning cinderblocks broken over their stomachs with a sledgehammer
‘The whole group running at full tilt … rushes straight into some sticky liquid,’ he alleged. ‘A blinding light flashes on. It’s not water they are in — it’s blood. Blood up to the knees, the waist, the chest. On the walls and the ceiling are chunks of rotten flesh, piles of bleeding entrails. There is only one way out: through the blood.
‘Where could they get so much blood? From the slaughterhouse.’
On another occasion, he wrote, Spetsnaz recruits loaded with weapons and equipment were forced to jump off a bridge in training, then try to swim to an island. There was no one on hand to rescue anyone in difficulty.
‘What if one of them drowns?’ he asked a Spetsnaz officer.
‘If he drowns it means he’s no good for Spetsnaz,’ was the reply.
‘An excellent place to get to know and to overcome oneself is the “Devil’s Ditch” that has been dug at the Spetsnaz central training centre,’ Suvorov wrote. ‘It is a ditch with metal spikes stuck into the bottom. The narrowest width is three metres. From there it gets wider and wider.’
This ditch is simply there as an obstacle for recruits to jump over, though nobody is forced to jump it. ‘But if someone wants to test himself, let him go and jump. ‘You start jumping at the narrow part and gradually move outwards. If you make a mistake, trip on something or don’t reach the other side, you land on the spikes.’
A lot of this tough talk is treated with an element of disdain by our own special forces.
‘The Spetsnaz is a blunt instrument; they are thuggish but efficient at what they do,’ says one ex-SAS officer. ‘In my experience they are more like paratroopers than real special forces.’
Another was more damning. ‘The Spetsnaz are thugs,’ he said. ‘They have no capacity for ethical or moral action. If you look at SEAL Team 6 or the SAS, they have an objective, then they find a method.
‘Spetsnaz are told exactly what to do and how to do it, with little or no room for initiative.’
He added: ‘They’re not really clandestine, they are there to intimidate. Some people are confused by the ragged way they operated in Salisbury. But that’s absolutely their modus operandi.’