A Russian machine gunner holding security stands up and opens fire from a residential home inside of Volnovakha. The target the machine gunner is firing on is unknown.

There has been a stranglehold on combat footage coming out of the Ukrainian region from the Russian perspective, so I've been doing quite a bit of digging. I don't like talking about conflicts from only one point of view because in every conflict between two groups of people there are two sides to the story. Regardless of how you feel about the war in Ukraine politically, it is imperative that we remember both sides of the conflict are being fought by Soldiers who are nothing more than people. The only way a war can reach casualty numbers as high as the World Wars is when we allow ourselves to become so corrupted by propaganda that we truly believe the other side of the conflict is less than human.

The hard part about this conflict is the constriction of information coming out of Russia from the point-of-view of their Soldiers. This is obviously calculated by Russia, but at the same time it's making it very easy to dehumanize not only the Russian Soldier, but the people of Russia as well. The only content we've seen coming out of the Russian perspective is coming from hack journalists like Paul Lancaster, which is more like sensationalized propaganda than actual reporting.

So, this is what we've got to work with. A couple of Russian Soldiers sitting in a civilian's home resting and setting up security for a break. Out of nowhere, one of the Russian machine gunners who is sitting on a couch sees something, and then stands to open fire on whatever the threat is. The camera's microphone quality is so poor that the sound of the machine gun rattling off rounds immediately kills the audio in the video making it impossible to know what's actually going on. We also have absolutely no idea who even recorded this, or how they got it out to the internet.

This footage was recorded in Volnovakha.