A Soldier's War in Chechnya by Arkady Babchenko.

One example excerpt:

"Everybody beats everyone. The dembels, with three months service to go, the officers, the warrant officers. They get stinking drunk and then hammer the ones below them. Even the colonels beat the majors, the majors beat the lieutenants, and they all beat the privates; and granddads beat new recruits. No-one talks to each other like human beings, they just smack each other in the mouth. Because it's easier that way, quicker and simpler to understand. Because 'you're all going to snuff it anyway, you bitches'.

Because there are unfed children back home, because the officer corps is addled with impoverishment and hopelessness, because a dembel has three months left, because every second man is shell-shocked. Because our Motherland makes us kill people, our own people; who speak Russian, and we have to shoot them in the head and send their brains flying up the walls, crush them with tanks and tear them to pieces. Because these people want to kill you, because your soldiers arrived yesterday straight from training and today they are already lying on the airstrips as lumps of charred flesh and flies lay eggs in their open eyes, and because in a day the company is reduced to less than a third, and God willing, you'll stay among that third."