Of them, we will only know a first name. Their names are Sergei, Nikita, Aleksandr, Andrei or Yevgeni. All were deployed in Boutcha near kyiv last March. In secret from their command, they managed to make a few phone calls to their parents or their fiancée. Ukrainian intelligence services intercepted more than 4,000 conversations in total. They forwarded them to New York Times, who translated and authenticated them.
Exclusive: The New York Times obtained intercepted calls made by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, including damning accounts of the execution of civilians. Hear the audio. https://t.co/CtMjVhLLZl pic.twitter.com/yjN0EGSQiu
— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 28, 2022
By listening to these often tired, sometimes exasperated voices, we discover the abyssal gap between the reality of the war and the story told by the Russian authorities or the state media. “There is a forest here, where the division has its headquarters. I entered and saw a sea of corpses, in civilian clothes. A sea. I’ve never seen so many bodies in my fucking life. Something crazy… We don’t even see where it stops“, says Sergei in one of the recordings. He continues: “On TV, they just want to deceive people, like, ‘It’s okay! There’s no war, just a special operation.’ In truth, it’s a fucking real war!“
Most of these soldiers explain that they were sent to the front without training and without understanding the meaning of their commitment. “I haven’t seen any fascists here, just people who lived normally“, says Sergei again.
“We were 400 paras. And we are 38 survivors, because the chiefs sent us to the slaughterhouse”, says another. All of them tell their relatives about the failing chain of command, their own artillery which targets them by mistake, the outdated or absent equipment, the massive losses in their ranks, the offensive towards kyiv which is slipping. “These hicks are moving forward and we just stand there. I never thought I’d end up in shit like this“, testifies Nikita, who uses the term ‘Khokhols’, an insult used by the Russians to speak of the Ukrainians.
“Our tanks and our armored vehicles have burned. They have blown up bridges, dams. The roads have been flooded. We can no longer move”.
Sergeiin a conversation picked up by the Ukrainians
None of this is completely new, but these conversations take on even more meaning as Russia today seeks to mobilize its population en masse.
These recordings also speak of the looting committed by the Russian forces. One of them explains to his fiancée that he broke into a safe with “5.2 million rubles” and that with them they will be able to buy an apartment. Others, like Nikita, recount with some shame their unit’s thuggish behavior in the villages: “Everything was looted. They drank all the alcohol, took all the money. Everyone does that here”.
But at the end of the war, there is above all exhaustion, fed up, depression: “I really want to go home. I’m tired of being afraid of everything. They took me to a fucking shithole. What are we waiting for here? That we get killed?“, says an anonymous. Andrei seems to him, on the verge of tears: “The atmosphere is very negative. There’s a guy who’s crying, another who’s fucking suicidal. They tire me, they make me sick“Some hide it less than others. The army, for them, is over. But first, they just hope to come back alive.