Just a few weeks in the past, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Andrew Roth acquired a name from a person asking to fulfill him urgently. He tells Michael Safi how he hung up the decision, jumped in a cab and hurried to the assembly place. There, he discovered an ex-paratrooper within the Russian military, Pavel Filatyev, who stated he was prepared to inform his story about his half in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Filatyev went on to element his experiences on his VKontakte social media web page and revealed a 141-page bombshell: a day-by-day description of his paratrooper unit’s actions from the second it was despatched to mainland Ukraine from Crimea. Filatyev described how his unit entered Kherson and captured the seaport, the way it dug in beneath heavy artillery fireplace for greater than a month close to Mykolaiv – and the way he himself was wounded and evacuated from the battle with an eye fixed an infection.
The paratrooper describes his unit’s lack of apparatus and the unhappiness of his fellow troopers – however denies he witnessed any abuse of civilians. His account is extraordinarily uncommon: by talking out he dangers jail. He has since left Russia and is claiming asylum within the European Union, however his future is unsure. “For myself,” he stated, “it is a private tragedy. As a result of what have we turn into? And the way can it get any worse?”
{Photograph}: Lewis Joly/AP
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