Braxton Taylor
It is the God-given right of any soldier in any armed force in history to complain about their food, especially when it comes to field rations — and they will, no matter how good it might be. Even the famed chili and macaroni MRE, with its Skittles and jalapeño cheese spread, is still a Meal, Ready-to-Eat and will plug you up like Elvis in his final days.
Still, there have been instances in military history where troops complaining about their food was absolutely warranted. In at least one instance, the food was so bad, it could draw sympathy from even their most fervent geopolitical enemies: In late 2022, Russian troops fighting in Ukraine took to the internet to complain about their North Korean allies getting canned dog meat as field rations. This is actually a step forward, as Russians in some parts of Ukraine have to hunt for dogs first.
And yet, that’s not even the biggest culinary war crime inflicted on Russians troops. In 2011, Russia’s interior ministry soldiers, troops responsible for Russia’s domestic security, didn’t even get dog meat in the far eastern posting of Vladivostok. Instead, they were fed dog food.
Long before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s botched “special military operation” in Ukraine, life in the Russian military was not all that great. Russia’s junior enlisted were subject to torture, slave labor and widespread harassment from their superior officers. They were also issued the same footwear worn by Russian soldiers under Tsar Peter I in the 18th century.
If you ask former Maj. Igor Matveyev, a veteran of Russia’s 1990s Chechen Wars, he might say the biggest problem facing Russian troops is widespread corruption. A repeated whistleblower, the erstwhile commander called out his fellow officers for operating a slave market in Khabarovsk in 2003. This time, the corruption affected his soldiers.
“It took me a month to determine through various reports exactly what was happening,” he told Reuters in 2011. “It’s embarrassing to say, but soldiers here were fed dog food. It was fed to them as stew.”
Matveyev leaked a video from his posting in Vladivostok in May 2011, where he alleged the Russian interior ministry soldiers there were fed substandard food from cans labeled “premium quality beef.” Matveyev released a 10-minute video that shows him tearing the label off a can of beef, only to reveal a dog-food label.
The dog-food incident wasn’t a one-time occurrence. Matveyev said the trumped-up dog food was fed to his soldiers for several months as a cost-saving measure. In the video, a voice explains that 13,800 cans were registered in the unit’s storehouse, including 4,485 kilograms of meat. It reveals there were 1,374 expired cans, along with 3,111 cans of dog food and no edible canned meat.
For Matveyev’s efforts to get his troops some food fit for human consumption, the Russian government launched an investigation that accused the unit’s food supply officer of stealing canned goods, claimed the dog-food cans were intended for the dogs on the installation, and announced that the troops were never fed the dog food.
Matveyev appealed to then-Prime Minister Putin and then-President Dmitri Medvedev to do something about the situation. Instead, he was relieved of his command and then accused of assaulting his soldiers. The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, a non-governmental organization formed to fight for human rights in Russia’s military, hired a lawyer to defend him.
Russia’s mothers posed a question to the Russian government: “If the dog food was really purchased for the base’s dogs, why were there 3,000 cans of it?”
Matveyev spent the next five years in prison, finally getting out in 2016. Food in the Russian armed forces is a source of continual controversy for Russia’s Defense and Interior Ministries. Soldiers in the Sakhalin region were fed maggot-infested food in 2013, its forces were given only onions, potatoes and pickles to invade Ukraine while Russian soldiers currently in Syria are alleged to have no food at all.
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