‘We kill them all’: Russian soldiers in Ukraine call home
KYIV, Ukraine — How do people raised with a sense of right and wrong end up involved in terrible acts of violence against others?
That’s the human mystery at the heart of 2,000 intercepted phone calls from Russian soldiers in Ukraine. These calls obtained by The Associated Press offer an intimate new perspective on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s year-old war, seen through the eyes of Russian soldiers themselves.
The AP identified calls made in March by soldiers in a military division that Ukrainian prosecutors say committed war crimes in Bucha, a town outside Kyiv that became an early symbol of Russian atrocities.
They show how deeply unprepared young soldiers — and their country — were for the war to come. Many joined the military because they needed money. They were told they’d be welcomed as heroes for liberating Ukraine from what Russian officials falsely claim are Nazi oppressors, and their Western backers, and that Kyiv would fall without bloodshed within a week.
The intercepts 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.
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.
This is the story of one of those men, Leonid. The AP couldn’t reach Leonid directly but did speak with his mother in Russia. The AP isn’t using his full name to protect his family. The AP has no evidence of his individual actions beyond his own testimony.
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 that airs on Saturday, The Associated
Press and Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting will broadcast never-before-heard audio of Russian soldiers at the front line of Putin’s war in Ukraine.
LEONID
Leonid became a soldier because he needed money. In the calls, there is an obvious moral dissonance between the way Leonid’s mother raised him and what he is seeing and doing in Ukraine. Still, she defended her son, insisting he never even came into contact with civilians in Ukraine.
“No one thought it would be so terrible,” his mother told the AP in January. “My son just said one thing: ‘My conscience is clear. They opened fire first.’ That’s all.”
She declined to listen to any