These are the stories of three of those men — Ivan, Leonid and Maxim. The AP isn’t using their full names to protect their families in Russia. The AP established that they were in areas when …
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.
The intercepts also show that as soldiers realized how much they’d been misled, they grew more and more afraid. Violence that once would have been unthinkable became normal. Looting and drinking offered moments of rare reprieve. Some said they were following orders to kill civilians or prisoners of war.
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. “No one thought it would be so terrible,” his mother said. “My son just said one thing: ‘My conscience is clear. They opened fire first.’ That’s all.”
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.
In another call, he tells his girlfriend he’s envious of his buddies who got shot in the feet and could go home. “A bullet in your foot is like four months at home with crutches,” he says. “It would be awesome.”Leonid: “I just wanted to call you again. I am able to speak.”Mother: “Mhm.”Mother: “That’s silly, Lyonya.”Mother: “It’s bull——, Lyonya. They’re crazy, you know that, right?”Mother: “Yeah, it is fear, what can you say here, it’s human fear. Everybody wants to live.
Ivan’s dream came true. He entered an elite unit of Russian paratroopers, which crossed into Ukraine the very first day of Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion, one year ago.Ivan was in Belarus on training when they got a Telegram message: “Tomorrow you are leaving for Ukraine. There is a genocide of the Russian population. And we have to stop it.”
Reached by the AP in January, Ivan’s mother at first denied she’d ever talked with her son from the front. But she agreed to listen to some of the intercepted audio and confirmed it was her speaking with Ivan.Ivan was her only son.Maxim is drunk in some of the calls, slurring his words, because life at the front line is more than he can take sober.
Maxim’s mood flips between boredom and horror — not just at what he has seen, but also what he has done.The only reason Maxim is able to speak with his family back in Russia is because they’ve been stealing phones from locals. He says they’re even shaking down kids.Stuck just outside Kyiv, bored and unsure why they’re in Ukraine in the first place, Maxim and a half-dozen other guys shot up a shopping mall and made off with all the gold they could carry.
On calls home, the high sweet voice of Maxim’s own young child bubbles in the background as he talks with his wife.Maxim: “Roughly? About two or three thousand rubles, right?”Wife: “Holy f—-, are we looters?!”
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