“I see no justice in this war. I don’t see truth here,” he said over a hidden coffee table in Moscow’s financial district. It was his first time personally sitting down with a reporter since returning from the war in Ukraine. Pavel Filatiev. Photographer: Yegor Slizyak “I am not afraid to fight in the war. But I have to feel justice, to understand that what I am doing is right. And I think all of this is failing not only because the government has stolen everything, but because we, the Russians, don’t feel that what we’re doing is right.” Two weeks ago, Filatyev took to his VKontakte social media page and published a 141-page bombshell: a daily account of how his paratrooper unit was sent to mainland Ukraine from Crimea, entered Kherson and captured the port and dug under of heavy artillery fire for more than a month near Mykolayiv – and then how he was eventually wounded and evacuated from the conflict with an eye infection. By then, he was convinced he needed to expose the rot at the core of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We were sitting under Mikolaiv’s artillery fire,” he said. “At that point I already thought we’re out here doing bullshit, what the hell do we need this war for? And I really had this thought: “God, if I survive, then I’m going to do everything I can to stop this.” He spent 45 days writing his memoirs of the conflict, breaking an omerta in which even the word war has been banished from public view. “I just can’t keep quiet anymore, even though I know I probably won’t change anything, and maybe I did something stupid to get myself into so much trouble,” Filatyev says, his fingers shaking with anxiety as the own. he lit another cigarette. His memoir, ZOV, is named for the tactical markings painted on Russian army vehicles that have been adopted as a pro-war symbol in Russia. Until now, there has not been a more detailed, voluntary report from a Russian soldier who participated in the invasion of Ukraine. Excerpts were published in Russia’s independent press, while Filatiev appeared via video for a television interview with TV Rain. Russian soldiers in BMP-2 amphibious infantry fighting vehicle move towards mainland Ukraine on the road near Armiansk, Crimea, February 25. Photo: EPA “It is very important that someone became the first to speak,” said Vladimir Osechkin, head of the human rights network Gulagu.net, which helped Filatyev flee Russia earlier this week. This also made Filatyev the first soldier known to have fled Russia due to opposition to the war. “And it opens Pandora’s box.” This week Russian investigative website iStories, which Russia has banned from the country, published a confession from another Russian soldier who admitted on camera to shooting and killing a civilian resident in the Ukrainian town of Andriivka. Most in the military are unhappy with what’s going on there Filatyev, who served in the Crimea-based 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment, described how his depleted and ill-equipped unit invaded mainland Ukraine behind a hail of rockets in late February with little in the way of logistics or targets. , and no idea why the war was happening at all. “It took me weeks to understand that there was no war on Russian soil and that we had just attacked Ukraine,” he said. At one point, Filatiev describes how voracious paratroopers, the Russian military’s elite, seized the port of Kherson and immediately began grabbing “computers and whatever valuables we could find.” Then they ransacked the kitchens for food. A civilian car was set on fire after an alleged Russian shelling in the southern city of Mykolaiv in April. Photo: Louai Barakat/Imageslive/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock “Like savages, we ate everything there: oats, porridge, jam, honey, coffee… We didn’t give a damn about anything, we had already reached the limit. Most had spent a month in the fields without comfort, showers or normal food. “What a savage state you can drive people into without thinking of the fact that they have to sleep, eat and wash,” he wrote. “Everything around us gave us a bad feeling. like wretches we were trying to survive”. People shout at Russian soldiers during an anti-occupation rally in Kherson on March 7. Photo: Olexandr Chornyi/AP Filatiev took a deep drag from a cigarette as he recounted the story, glancing nervously around for anyone watching him near midnight in a Moscow park, then tries to explain. “I know it will sound wild to a foreign reader,” he said, describing a fellow soldier who stole a computer. “But [the soldier] he knows this is worth more than one of his wages. And who knows if he’ll be alive tomorrow anyway. So he takes it. I’m not trying to justify what he did. But I think it’s important to say why people behave the way they do, to understand how to stop them… What is a person going to do in these kinds of extreme situations.” He protested extensively against what he called the “degradation” of the military, including the use of outdated kit and vehicles that left Russian soldiers exposed to Ukrainian counterattacks. The rifle he was given before the war was rusty and had a broken strap, he said. “We were just an ideal target,” he wrote, describing the journey to Kherson in antiquated and unarmored UAZ trucks that sometimes stood still for 20 minutes. “It was not clear what the plan was – as always nobody knew anything.” Russian soldiers guard an area as a group of foreign journalists visit Kherson on May 20. Photo: AP Filatyev describes his unit, as the war continued, pinned down in trenches for nearly a month near Mykolaiv under Ukrainian artillery fire. It was there that a shell threw mud into his eye, leading to an infection that nearly blinded him. As frustration grew at the front, he wrote of reports of soldiers deliberately shooting themselves to escape the front and collect 3 million rubles (£40,542) in compensation, as well as rumors of acts of mutilation of captured soldiers and corpses. In the interview, he said he had not personally witnessed the acts of abuse committed during the war. But he described a culture of anger and resentment in the military that shatters the facade of total support for the war portrayed in Russian propaganda. “Most people in the military are unhappy with what’s going on there, they’re unhappy with the government and their commanders, they’re unhappy with Putin and his politics, they’re unhappy with the defense minister, who has never served in the military.” , He wrote. Pavel Filatiev. Photographer: Yegor Slizyak Since going public, he said, his entire unit has cut off contact with him. But he believed that 20% of them supported his protest. And many others, in calm conversations, had told him of a sickening feeling of respect for the patriotism of Ukrainians fighting to defend their own soil. Or he had complained about Russia’s mistreatment of its own soldiers. “No one treats veterans here,” he said at one point. At military hospitals, he described meeting disgruntled soldiers, including wounded sailors from the cruiser Moskva, sunk by Ukrainian missiles in April, shouting at a senior officer outside the room. And, in ZOV, he claimed that “there are piles of dead, whose relatives have not been compensated,” confirming media reports of wounded soldiers waiting months for payments. Filatiev’s original plan was to publish his memoirs and immediately turn himself in to the police. But Osechkin, the activist, told him to reconsider while repeatedly urging him to leave the country. Until this week, he had refused to do so. The Russian cruiser Moskva, damaged by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles, before sinking. Photo: Twitter “So I’m leaving, I’m going to America and who am I there? What should I do?” he said. “If I am not even needed in my country, then who needs me there?” That’s why, for two weeks, Filatiev stayed in a different hotel every night and lived out of a heavy black backpack he carried with him, trying to stay one step ahead of the police. Even then, he admits, it shouldn’t have been hard to find. The Guardian was unable to independently verify all the details of Filatyev’s story, but provided documents and photos showing he was a paratrooper in the 56th Airborne Regiment stationed in Crimea, who was treated for an eye injury while “on special duty in Ukraine” in April and that he had written directly to the Kremlin with his complaints about the war before it went public. Filatiev poses with a rifle. Photo: Yegor Slizyak Old photographs show Filatyev as a teenager in a blue-and-white telnyashka (the traditional blue-and-white undergarment worn by military personnel) among his fellow soldiers, then hanging from a carousel during paratrooper training, then, now older, shaven in tan camouflage posing with a rifle in the Crimea before the war began. Born into a military family in the southern city of Volgodonsk, Filatiev, 34, spent much of his first 20 years in the military. After serving in Chechnya in the late 2000s, he spent nearly a decade as a horse trainer, working for Russian meat producer Miratorg and wealthy clients before re-enlisting in 2021 for financial reasons, he said. He is now a changed man. It remains powerfully built and articulate, but war and stress have taken their toll. His scarred cheeks are covered by two-week-old stubble. He still can’t see properly outside of his…
