A half-dozen Russian soldiers talk about being shipped to an area of intense fighting in eastern Ukraine just 11 days after their mobilization. Asked about his shooting practice, a bearded conscript says, “Once. Three magazines.”

In a town near Yekaterinburg, in central Russia, newly mobilized men march in place in their street clothes. “No machine guns, nothing, no clothes, no shoes,” says an unidentified observer. “Half of them are hungover, old, at risk — the ambulance should be on duty.”

Elsewhere, scores of relatives of freshly drafted Russian soldiers crowd outside a training center, passing items through its fence to the recruits — boots, berets, bulletproof vests, backpacks, sleeping bags, camping mats, medicine, bandages and food.

“This is not how it’s done,” a woman named Elena told the news outlet Samara Online. “We buy everything.”

Despite draconian laws against criticizing the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Russian social media is awash with scenes like those above captured in widely circulating videos. Such posts are taking the Ministry of Defense to task for acting just as Western military experts predicted: rushing thousands of newly drafted, untrained, ill-equipped soldiers to Ukraine, too desperate to plug holes in its defensive lines to mold the men into cohesive units.

“They are giving them at best basics and at worst nothing and throwing them into combat, which suggests that these guys are just literally cannon fodder,” said William Alberque, a specialist in the Russian armed forces and the director of the arms control program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a research organization based in London.

An extreme sign of disorder came on Saturday, when two men from a former Soviet state opened fire at a Russian training camp. They killed 11 volunteers and wounded 15 before being shot dead, Russian outlets reported.

Russia’s military is struggling to balance two objectives, military analysts said: deploying enough troops to halt recent Ukrainian advances while rebuilding ground forces decimated during eight months of war.

Inevitably, some draftees have already been killed or captured, stirring ever harsher criticism of the mobilization effort announced on Sept. 21 and considered a shambles from the start.

In theory, the draft was of men in the reserves with military skills that needed refreshing, but in practice it pulled in virtually anybody, critics said.

“The result of the mobilization is that untrained guys are thrown onto the front line,” Anastasia Kashevarova, a military blogger who has supported the war, wrote in an angry post, one of several such broadsides.

“Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow — zinc coffins are already coming,” she added. “You told us that there would be training, that they would not be sent to the front line in a week. Were you lying again?”

Thus far, the Kremlin has tolerated criticism of the conduct of the war, while jailing or fining those who questioned any need for the invasion. But there were rumblings this past week that it should crack down on military critics, too.

On Friday, President Vladimir V. Putin confirmed at a news conference that 16,000 recruits had already been deployed to combat units, some with as few as five to 10 days of training. The recruits were sorely needed, given that the front in Ukraine stretched for nearly 700 miles, he said, adding that the training would continue there.

Evidence of the lack of training is anecdotal, but the sheer number of videos from across Russia, along with scattered threats from draftees to strike over the conditions, other news reports and commentaries, underscores the depth of the problems.

In one widely circulated video, a recruit from Moscow assigned to the First Tank Regiment — a storied unit hit hard early in the invasion — said that the regimental commander had announced that there would be no shooting practice or even theoretical training before the men deployed.