About 2,000 secret recordings of intercepted conversations between Russian soldiers in Ukraine and their loved ones back home offer a harrowing new perspective on Vladimir Putin’s year-old wa…
KYIV, Ukraine — One Russian soldier tells his mother that the young Ukrainians dead from his first firefight looked just like him. Another explains to his wife that he’s drunk because alcohol makes it easier to kill civilians. A third wants his girlfriend to know that in all the horror, he dreams about just being with her.
They tell their mothers what this war actually looks like: About the teenage Ukrainian boy who got his ears cut off. How the scariest sound is not the whistle of a rocket flying past, but the silence that means it’s coming directly for you. How modern weapons can obliterate the human body so there’s nothing left to bring home.
The AP spoke with the mothers of Ivan and Leonid, but couldn’t reach Maxim or his family. The AP verified these calls with the help of the Dossier Center, an investigative group in London funded by Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.In a joint production on Saturday, Feb.
New video footage of Bakhmut shot from the air with a drone for The Associated Press shows how the longest battle of the year-long Russian invasion has turned the city of salt and gypsum mines in eastern Ukraine into a ghost town. The footage was shot Feb. 13. From the air, the scale of destruction becomes plain to see.
Leonid: “Yeah, we did. We shot from the tanks, machine guns and rifles. We had no losses. We destroyed their four tanks. There were dead bodies lying around and burning. So, we won.”Leonid: “More than ever!”Leonid: “They were lying there, just 18 or 19 years old. Am I different from them? No, I’m not.”Leonid tells his mother their plan was to seize Kyiv within a week, without firing a single bullet. Instead, his unit started taking fire near Chernobyl.
Mother: “So all the people left, right? You guys aren’t looting them, are you? You’re not going into other people’s houses?”Leonid: “We take food, bed linen, pillows. Blankets, forks, spoons, pans.”Leonid: “Whoever doesn’t have any — socks, clean underwear, T-shirts, sweaters.”Leonid tells his mother about the terror of going on patrol and not knowing what or who they will encounter. He describes using lethal force at the slightest provocation against just about anyone.
A woman walks by a building destroyed by a Russian strike in Kupiansk, Ukraine, Monday, Feb. 20, 2023. President Joe Biden paid an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Monday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a defiant display of Western solidarity with a country still fighting what he called “a brutal and unjust war” days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion. “Of course, you’ll come,” his mother says. “No doubts. You’re my beloved. Of course, you’ll come.
Ivan: “We are really at the front line. As far out as you could be. Kyiv is 15 kilometers from us. It is scary, Olya. It really is scary.”As things get worse for Ivan in Ukraine, his mother’s patriotism deepens and her rage grows. The family has relatives in Kyiv, but seems to believe this is a righteous war against Nazi oppression in Ukraine — and the dark hand of the United States they see behind Kyiv’s tough resistance. She says she’ll go to Ukraine herself to fight.
He says they’re alone out there and exposed. Communications are so bad they’re taking more fire from their own troops than from the Ukrainians. “I wanted to give it to normal families with kids, but the people out there were drunks,” he tells his wife. But Maxim and his mother believe it’s the Ukrainians who are deluded by fake news and propaganda, not them. The best way to end the war, his mother says, is to kill the presidents of Ukraine and the United States.
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