The Russian soldier exposing the horrors of life
in Putin’s invading army
Today in
Focus Series
Presented
by Michael Safi with Andrew Roth; produced by Ruth Abrahams and Axel Kacoutié;
executive producers Elizabeth Cassin and Phil Maynard
Tue 20 Sep
2022 03.00 BST
The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Andrew Roth, on
his extraordinary meeting with ex-paratrooper Pavel Filatyev, the
highest-ranking officer to speak about fighting in Ukraine
A few weeks
ago, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Andrew Roth got a call from a man
asking to meet him urgently. He tells Michael Safi how he hung up the call,
jumped in a cab and hurried to the meeting place. There, he found an
ex-paratrooper in the Russian army, Pavel Filatyev, who said he was ready to
tell his story about his part in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Filatyev
went on to detail his experiences on his VKontakte social media page and
published a 141-page bombshell: a day-by-day description of his paratrooper
unit’s activities from the moment it was sent to mainland Ukraine from Crimea.
Filatyev described how his unit entered Kherson and captured the seaport, how
it dug in under heavy artillery fire for more than a month near Mykolaiv – and
how he himself was wounded and evacuated from the conflict with an eye infection.
The
paratrooper describes his unit’s lack of equipment and the unhappiness of his
fellow soldiers – but denies he witnessed any abuse of civilians. His account
is extremely rare: by speaking out he risks prison. He has since left Russia
and is claiming asylum in the European Union, but his future is uncertain. “For
myself,” he said, “this is a personal tragedy. Because what have we become? And
how can it get any worse?”
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