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The frontlines of Russia’s battle in Ukraine have been infested with rats and mice, which are apparently spreading diseases that cause soldiers to vomit and bleed from their eyes, limiting combat capabilities and copying the terrible circumstances that plagued troops in trench warfare during WWI.

Some of the Ukrainian soldiers spoke of how their battalion was beset last fall by a “mouse epidemic” while fighting in the south.

The infestations are partly due to the change in seasons and mice’s mating cycle, but the stagnant trench warfare, an echo of WWI, is luring the rats into the soldiers’ encampments. The entire 1,000-kilometre front line has been under siege by the pests as they are lured by the stench of dead bodies and the limited warmth that the bunkers provide.

“Imagine going to bed, and the night begins with a mouse crawling into your pants or sweater, or chewing your fingertips, or biting your hand. You get two or three hours’ sleep, depending on how lucky you are,” says a Ukranian soldier only identified as ‘Kira’.

“It was not the mice who were visiting us; we were their guests.”

The soldiers have tried everything to repel the pests, including poison, spraying ammonia, and even praying. These efforts had little effect, and the soldiers have even gone as far as bringing in cats, which worked for a while until the felines also became overwhelmed.

“We had a cat named Busia, and at first she also helped and ate mice. But later there were so many of them that she refused. A cat can catch one or two mice, but if there are 70 of them, it’s unrealistic.”

Video footage from the front lines in the stagnant war shows mice and rats scurrying around under beds, in backpacks, power generators, coat pockets and pillowcases. One scene even shows mice pouring out from a Russian mortar turret like bullets from a machine gun.

Ukraine’s military intelligence reported in December about an outbreak of “mouse fever” in multiple Russian troops. According to the paper, the illness spreads from mice to people “by inhaling mouse faeces dust or by ingestion of mouse faeces in food.”

Symptoms of the disease include fevers, rashes, low blood pressure, haemorrhaging in the eyes, vomiting and, because it affects the kidneys, severe back pain and problems urinating. That’s a lot to deal with while bullets are flying overhead.

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence has said that “‘mouse fever’ has significantly reduced the combat capability of the Russian soldiers.” They’re not the only ones, although nothing was mentioned of the Ukrainian soldiers.

The terrible conditions hark back to conditions on the front during World War I, where the pileup of waste and corpses allowed “trench rats” to breed rapidly. Robert Graves, an English poet who fought in the trenches, wrote in his memoirs about the rats that “came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly.” When a new officer arrived, on his first night he “heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.”

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“Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.”

‘Kira’ says the mice chew everything, “Radios, repeaters, wires. Mice got into cars and chewed on the electrical wiring, so the cars wouldn’t run, and they also chewed on tanks and wheels.”

In World War I, soldiers could not solve the trench rat problem, so instead, they killed rats for their sport. Trying to spike one on a bayonet became a form of entertainment. The population did not decrease until the war ended. With no clear end in sight for the Ukraine/Russia war, the soldiers on both sides are left to fend for themselves against the rats and mice.

[source:cnn]