Conversations between Russian soldiers and their loved ones reveal the reality of war for the Kremlin’s troops. The Ukrainian military managed to intercept thousands of such conversations and forwarded some fragments to the British newspaper The Guardian.
Ukrainian experts have already managed to intercept thousands of conversations between Russian soldiers and the home front. They studied the conversations, looked for snippets of information, and then made the conversations public.
In the initial period of the war, the insecurity around Russian communications was so great that strategy talks between military commanders were revived, even amateurishly, thanks to the military’s use of open radio frequencies.
“Let’s drink the water from the puddles”
The first conversation is between a mother and her son, who was at the front near the town of Lyman in eastern Ukraine on November 8. Then he decided to ignore the orders of his superiors. “Nobody feeds us, Mom,” she complained. “Our actions are shit, to be honest. We collect water from puddles, filter it and drink it”. You also said that the promises of ammunition to turn the battle around have come to nothing. “Where are the missiles Putin bragged about?” she wondered.
The soldier assured his mother that everything would be fine. “I always prayed to mom, every morning,” she said. The mother later stated The Guardian who burst into tears and put the phone down.
The conversations were forwarded to the British newspaper by the Ukrainian military The Guardian paint a picture of the attitude of the Russian armed forces. “The breadth of the talks that have taken place gives a very clear picture of the weaknesses of the Russian military,” said a former Kremlin defense official, who declined to be named.
“Security has always been a disaster, both in the military and among defense officials,” the source said. “For example, in 2013 they tried to get all Defense Department personnel to replace our iPhones with Russian-made smartphones. But everyone kept using their iPhone as a second cell phone because it was so much better. Eventually, the ministry gave in and stopped caring. If the top leadership doesn’t take security very seriously, how can you expect discipline in the military?”
‘Reinforcements? No. Communication? No.’
The British newspaper also received a conversation between a father and his fallen son’s colleagues on 6 November. “Reinforcements? No. Communication? No”, a soldier answered the questions of the next grieving parent. “They told us not to withdraw. Otherwise we could be shot.
“Even now we see soldiers who continue to use social media and tell their wives and mothers about the war, sometimes exposing their location,” the source said. “There is absolutely no discipline and it will only get worse now that they have mobilized 300,000 people who are unlikely to be trained. The mobilized soldiers will be terrified of being in a war zone and will obviously try to call home.”
According to the British newspaper, the Ukrainian military is not susceptible to such communications interceptions.
‘Run from bloodshed’
In a third conversation, on October 26, a soldier in the Donetsk region tells his wife how he and three others had fled “bloodshed” and how he had considered surrendering. “I’m in a sleeping bag, all wet and coughing,” he said to her, “we could all be slaughtered.”
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