Secret service intercepts phone calls
Russian soldiers complain: “They are destroying us”
09/05/2023, 4:16 p.m
Fierce fighting raged during the Ukrainian counter-offensive – with high losses. The SBU secret service is now publishing intercepted conversations by Russian soldiers. They severely criticize their superiors. However, it is questionable how representative the statements are.
The counter-offensive of the Ukrainian armed forces was in its second week when the Russian soldier Andrei called his wife and told her that his unit was suffering heavy losses. They are so badly equipped, he says, that he was reminded of Soviet troops in World War II. “They’re killing us,” Andrei said in the July 12 conversation, referring to the leadership of the Russian military. “No ammunition, nothing, shall we use our fingers for bayonets?”
The phone call is an excerpt of 17 conversations between Russian soldiers on the front in eastern and southern Ukraine, which were intercepted by the Ukrainian secret service SBU in the first two weeks of July. The talks, which were laden with expletives, were made available to the Reuters news agency by secret service circles. They give a partial insight into the conditions that Russian soldiers sometimes find in Ukraine. In addition to a lack of ammunition, they also complain about a lack of training and equipment as well as poor morale in the troops.
Reuters news agency has not been able to verify how representative the statements are and whether they represent an objective description of Russian forces in Ukraine. Intelligence circles declined to say how the footage provided was selected. The names, phone numbers and in most cases the units of 15 soldiers heard in the recordings were disclosed by the SBU. Reuters was able to verify that the numbers matched the names of the soldiers or their relatives. However, calls to the numbers either went unanswered or were rejected.
“That’s it, there’s no more second battalion”
The statements of ten soldiers are used in the Reuters reporting. Reuters was able to verify their identity with the help of social media accounts, in which the men can also be seen in photos in military uniforms. Neil Melvin from the London think tank International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) considers the statements to be authentic. They occupied the state in which the Russian soldiers were partially sent into battle without major training, resulting in high casualties. This, in turn, increased tensions within the troops.
“That’s it, there’s no second battalion anymore,” Maxim, a soldier from Siberia’s Irkutsk region, told his wife in a July 3 phone call. “They fucking crumbled them.” Maxim describes the fate of a battalion, usually of 500 soldiers, fighting at the front in Lyman in north-eastern Ukraine. Maxim calls his fallen comrades “Cargo 200” – a military code word from Russia’s Afghanistan war from 1979 to 1989, which stands for a dead man. “Cargo 300” is the code for an injured person. “In the end, they couldn’t even salvage the 300s, the 300s became 200s,” Maxim reports of the death of his comrades.
“They are already rotten”
Alexei calls his mother Elena on July 12. “They were torn apart,” he reports of his comrades. “They were lying there, some couldn’t get them out, they were already rotting, eaten by worms,” Alexei recalls. “Imagine being thrown into the front lines, without equipment, with nothing.” Alexei was drafted on September 29, 2022 and soon found himself on the front lines, Reuters learned. He was sent to the battlefield despite President Vladimir Putin’s public assurances that the new recruits would not have to go to the front.
Inquiries from Reuters about the statements to the Russian Presidential Office initially went unanswered. Alexei accuses his commanders of hiding the actual extent of the losses from the military leadership. “Everything is covered up,” reports the soldier. “Everyone is afraid… And in the end, the generals don’t care.”