Monday 23 May 2022 10:55 PM Russian PoW's film shows cruelty and chaos as bungled Ukraine invasion ... trends now

Monday 23 May 2022 10:55 PM Russian PoW's film shows cruelty and chaos as bungled Ukraine invasion ... trends now
Monday 23 May 2022 10:55 PM Russian PoW's film shows cruelty and chaos as bungled Ukraine invasion ... trends now

Monday 23 May 2022 10:55 PM Russian PoW's film shows cruelty and chaos as bungled Ukraine invasion ... trends now

 A Russian tank officer who was captured after one month fighting in Ukraine was found to have been filming a home movie about the invasion on his mobile phone.

The footage, in which he talks about comrades being turned into ‘scraps of meat’ and ‘mince’, offers an astonishing insight into Moscow’s spluttering invasion as his gun jams, his vehicle explodes and a raid on a Ukrainian military base goes wrong.

It was filmed by Yuri Shalaev – a 23-year-old lieutenant who trained at Moscow’s top military academy and was stationed in Chechnya before the war – in defiance of Kremlin orders to avoid using personal mobile phones on security grounds.

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Kyiv’s interior ministry, says: ‘This is very rare since 95 per cent of the occupiers do not take their phones and if they do, very few of them have smartphones, since most come from poorer regions of Russia. It is significant since it shows the callous actions and chaotic military approach of the Russian forces.’

Prepared: Lieutenant Shalaev trained at Moscow¿s leading military academy

Prepared: Lieutenant Shalaev trained at Moscow’s leading military academy

Shalaev, the commander of a motorised platoon, was captured last month after three days cowering with two injured comrades in a Donbas village basement following an attack on their armoured personnel carrier (APC).

His video material – which starts with happy family scenes as he gives his daughter a pink bike and ends with the frightened officer whispering in hiding to his wounded comrades – has been spliced into a documentary by Ukrainian journalists.

They also obtained his text message conversations with 172 other soldiers involved in the invasion, exposing dismay over heavy losses, fury with shoddy equipment, incidents of troops refusing to fight and ill-equipped riot police being sent into battle.

Three days after the war began, for example, one soldier says there are three trucks filled with corpses from five regiments. ‘That is true,’ says another recruit, before adding: ‘Many just ran away.’

Another desperate soldier says he is the only officer surviving in Kharkiv, the country’s second city that was attacked at the start of the war and is slowly returning to normal life after Ukraine pushed back Russian forces a fortnight ago. ‘I’m in danger, I’m wounded,’ he writes, pleading for help.

The extraordinary video starts several months before the war with film of Shalaev’s family celebration, singing along to patriotic pop songs and drinking whisky with an uncle who ends up urinating on himself and struggling to clamber on to a bed.

In one scene filmed at a party, smartly dressed young people belt out a popular song called Officers that contains lines such as ‘Officers, officers, your heart is at the gunpoint, for Russia and freedom to the end’.

The reality proved rather different after Shalaev – who is from a small town near the Arctic Circle – was taken to Crimea, bussed into southern Ukraine and then brought to the Donbas frontline.

Twelve days into the war, the young Russian officer filmed himself searching for weapons at what appears to be a captured Ukrainian position.

‘B****, will at least one gun be here?’ he asks, attempting to open a safe marked ‘Combat control documents’ and filming an empty arsenal. ‘Damn, did they really keep the f****** defence here or did we

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