Source: TW
A 34-year-old former Russian paratrooper, Pavel Filatyev, has published a remarkable in-depth account of his experiences of the Ukraine war. He served with the Feodosia-based 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment and fought in southern Ukraine for two months. A 🧵 follows.
Filatyev was part of the force that captured Kherson in February and was hospitalised with an eye injury after spending more than a month under heavy Ukrainian artillery bombardment near Mykolaiv. By that time, he was completely disillusioned with the war. While recuperating, Filatyev wrote a scathing 141-page memoir titled ‘ZOV’ (after the recognition symbols painted on vehicles of the invasion force) and published it on VKontakte (Russian Facebook). Not surprisingly, he’s now been forced to flee Russia for his own safety.
I’ve previously covered Russian soldiers’ accounts of their experiences in Ukraine (see below), but Filatyev’s is by far the longest and most detailed yet published. No full English translation yet exists AFAIK, so I’ll summarise various points here. In this first installment, I’ll cover FIlatyev’s experiences in the six months before the war, when he was going through training as a paratrooper in Crimea with the 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment. It was not a happy experience for him.
Living conditions earlier
Filatyev comes from a military family. After an earlier period of military service, he rejoined the Russian Army in August 2021, joining his father’s old unit. Although it was theoretically an elite unit, he found that the soldiers’ living conditions were terrible.
He found there were no beds in his company’s barracks, which were infested by a pack of stray dogs fed by the dining room staff. He avoided a nearby hostel which he was advised was a “sewer”. Another company found a bed for him in their barracks, which lacked a power supply. Eventually, Filatyev moved to a cheap hotel when Crimea’s holiday season ended. As he later wrote, “I had to run like a homeless man from one barracks to another, looking for a bed to sleep in, until I found a place to rent at my own expense [after] 3 weeks.”
He also found the unit’s food was appalling: “there is not enough food for everyone, the potatoes in the soup on the water are raw, the bread is stale”. Basic hygiene was difficult because the water supply was interrupted, resulting in a lack of working showers or toilets.
Filatyev spent ten days waiting for a uniform before being given a summer outfit but no shoes in the right size. In the end, he went out and bought his own. (This is a common situation often resulting from supply chain corruption).
Training
During his previous military experience, Filatyev had received substantial training in theory, tactics and physical training. He expected to get improved training following Russia’s much-vaunted military reforms in the 2010s, but found that the reality was very different.
The company commander was largely absent. The unit’s young political officer attempted on his own initiative to give lessons in tactics. One day, the company went to the firing range for target practice, but the training session was a fiasco.
“[We] get up at five in the morning, spend three hours lined up and waiting for the truck, we finally go, we arrive at 12:00, line up, stand, the commanders at the range do not like the way some piece of paper is filled out, the major tears up the sheet and throws it … He yells with hysterical cries that there will be no firing because of this, the whole company stands and contemptuously looks at the hysterical major with sympathy for the young starshina [sergeant major] who is being discouraged from taking any common-sense initiative …”
Finally, at 13:00, the target practice got underway in searing midsummer Crimean temperatures. “The heat is 50+, there is no water, we initially drove until lunch, now it turns out that we are here for the whole day, plus night shooting [until] one o’clock in the morning”.
The soldiers finally returned to their base exhausted, dehydrated and famished, having only had one dry ration pack for each 3-4 men. As Filatyev comments, “This is not hardening of the body, this is nothing more than sabotage of one’s own army.”
There was a lengthy delay before any parachute jump practice was organised.
In the meantime, a mass COVID outbreak in the unit was dealt with by having positive results “miraculously disappear[ing] somewhere in everyone’s tests” despite many soldiers not being vaccinated.
With the onset of winter, the soldiers were given worn-out winter uniforms of the wrong sizes. Filatyev got into trouble by complaining, but in the end privately purchased a jacket for his own use (likely one that had previously been stolen and resold by corrupt depot staff).
Parachute jump practice finally took place in November 2021, but it was another fiasco. Several days were wasted packing parachutes “from morning until 21:00,” as it turned out that half of the company did not know how to do it. The soldiers set off for their jump practice at 02:00 in sub-zero conditions, travelling on open-top trucks. They spent five hours “jumping on the spot … to warm up somehow”. When they jumped, Filatyev found that the drop zone had mistakenly been centred on a cemetery.
Fortunately, Filatyev writes, “it’s good that the weather was good, everyone taxied out, no one landed on a cross or anyone’s grave.” But after he got back to base, he found that he had contracted pneumonia in both lungs, with many comrades also falling ill. He was sent to a military hospital where he spent a week recovering. While there, he found that his company commander had attempted to cover up his stay in the hospital, presumably to avoid awkward questions about why so many of the unit’s members fell sick at once.
Complaint
By this time, Filatyev was fed up. He wrote a detailed complaint to the Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) outlining the many violations of regulations and the poor military ethos that he saw, as well as the almost complete lack of training provided to the troops. “An atmosphere of apathy reigns among contract servicemen,” Filatyev complained, “and 90% of them are discussing in the smoking rooms how to finish their contract as soon as possible … I also heard from a number of officers that they don’t want to serve here.”
Esprit de corps
There was also little esprit de corps among the men. “The Russian and airborne unit flags [looked] as if they had gone through a war (only a fortnight ago they were replaced) and the unit staff … patched them up because there was already a hole in the hole”.
The unit raised the flags every morning accompanied by the Russian national anthem, but as Filatyev notes sardonically, “half the servicemen do not sing it”. He wrote that “the duty and anti-terrorist units are on duty only on paper” and did not attend morning roll calls.
Filatyev told the MOD that what he had observed over the past 3.5 months “horrifies me … in fact, I see complete anarchy, there is only a faint hint of combat readiness, [and] I hear a lot of ridicule among the local population about Feodosia VDV [airborne troops].”
Reorganization
Things got worse when Filatyev’s unit was reorganised just before the war (in December 2021), becoming the 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment. But it was a regiment only in name, consisting of 2 battalions and a reconnaissance company equivalent in numbers to a platoon. The units were grossly undermanned on the eve of the war. His own 2nd Airborne Assault Battalion consisted of three companies of 45-60 people each (165 in total), and the amphibious assault battalion also consisted of 165 people. But on paper they had 500 people.
Filatyev blames widespread corruption and a system of photo reports, which enables commanders to hide problems, for this situation. He suggests that as few as 100,000 Russian troops may have invaded Ukraine in February (despite paper numbers of at least 200,000).
When the new regiment was formed, the deputy commander of the Airborne Forces arrived to carry out an inspection. Instead of training, “we stupidly fucked around all day, as usual, instead”, lining up uselessly for 7 hours while the officers inspected the regiment’s vehicles.
“All this [equipment] is a hundred years old, a lot is not working properly, but on their reports everything was probably fine and this was two months before the special operation.” The general showed no interest in the men standing in their worn-out “scarecrow” uniforms.
Retaliation
Filatyev’s complaint to the MOD led only to retaliation from his own commander, who was rumoured to have tried to file a criminal complaint against him. Some officers told him that they supported him, “saying that all this is certainly true, but it is useless to complain.”
Not surprisingly, Filatyev writes, by January 2022 “the desire to serve has disappeared completely. I realized that our combat capability, to put it mildly, is not very good, we do nonsense, useless chores, dressing up or pretending to have classes”.
He concluded that “the Russian army is in a madhouse and everything is for show”, despite some people still wanting to make something good of it. He blames middle-ranking career officers “who do not want to lose it all (they are the ones who keep the rotten system)”.
Pre-Invasion
In the next installment, I’ll cover Filatyev’s experiences immediately before and just after the start of the invasion in February 2022.
Source: TW
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. This 🧵 highlights the first-person account of Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatyev, who was in the invasion force that entered Ukraine from Crimea, captured Kherson and unsuccessfully fought to reach Mykolaiv. Filatyev’s experiences with the regiment were so disillusioning that he sought unsuccessfully to make an early exit from his contract with the Russian Army. He had already written a letter to the Russian Ministry of Defence complaining about his unit’s unfitness for combat. He was also worried about what his unit’s “anarchy” said about the state of the rest of the army. “And this is in the airborne forces, the elite, the commander-in-chief’s reserve! It is scary to imagine how things will be in other units.” This turned out to be prescient.
In mid-February, Filatyev’s unit and many others based in Crimea were sent to a training range at Staryi Krym, not far from their base in Feodosiya. He realised that something was up from the news and from the fact that even sick soldiers were being sent there for training. Filatyev and his comrades did not know what was going on. “Rumours and information varied, from Ukraine and NATO attacking Crimea and us simply having to gather at the borders to prevent this, to Ukraine attacking the [Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics].” He assumed that he would be sent to the Donbas as “it seemed logical to me that [we] would carry out an operation under the guise of peacekeepers”, defending the region while a referendum was being held to annex “the woeful Donbas” to Russia.
Filatyev postponed his earlier intention to quit the army. He “thought now that something was brewing, refusing would be shameful, tantamount to chickening out … I do not know what drove me, patriotism or unwillingness to back down.”
The situation at the training range dismayed Filatyev. His entire company of 40 men shared one tent. “In the tent, bunks, a potbelly stove. Even in Chechnya life was better organized. The food in the canteen is even worse than in the garrison.” There was nowhere to wash.
Other units had it worse. Some “had nothing to heat stoves in February, there was no place to wash, because of which people went into the sea in winter”. Sickness was rife. Hospitals became clogged with patients, leading to “an order … to ban them going to hospital.”
Equipment was also in short supply. Filatyev and several others in his unit “did not have a sleeping bag, no camouflage suit, [body] armour, helmets, etc”. They ended up taking turns to share equipment.
Filatyev’s commander, who refused to join the rest of the company in the tent, was unsympathetic. “I asked him where my sleeping bag and ‘Warrior’ kit were, to which he replied that he was not there [at the time], so where to sleep and where to get ammunition is my problem.”
Filatyev was given a rusty machine gun with a broken belt, which jammed after the first few shots. He spent a long time oiling and repairing it. On 20 February, his regiment – now numbering 500-600 men – assembled and prepared to move out towards an unknown destination.
Conscripts were meant to have stayed in the garrison, as deploying them to conflict zones is supposed to be illegal, but they were also among the invasion force. Filatyev later met one conscript who told him how he had been badly wounded in a ‘friendly fire’ incident. The conscript had been told that “you will not have to do anything, you are a signalman” in an artillery unit. He had evidently been promised he wouldn’t be sent into battle. Which was technically true: it was his own side that had accidentally shot him.
The Russians had plenty of weapons, but were haphazard about rations: “everyone got food and water as they wanted, our command doesn’t care.” By now, after some having spent up to a month on the range in freezing and squalid conditions, “everyone was dirty and exhausted”.
After handing in their mobile phones, the unit moved in convoy to the town of Krasnoperekopsk, where they spent three uncomfortable nights sleeping in their trucks. Although the trucks were supposed to have stoves, many did not work, forcing the men to sleep in the cold.
Day before
On 23 February, the day before the invasion, the divisional commander turned up “to congratulate us on this occasion and announced that our pay would be $69 a day from tomorrow.” This was a major pay rise and signalled to Filatyev that “something serious was going to happen”. Even at this late stage, with ammunition and grenades being issued and rumours that the force was going to attack Kherson, Filatyev believed such a prospect was “nonsense” and that the Russians would most likely go to the Donbas. He disbelieved that Kyiv would be targeted.
Filatyev still did not even have basic equipment such as body armour or ‘Warrior’ (Ratnik) combat kit. Fortunately, his battalion commander was friendly to him, got him the missing equipment, and assigned him to mortars to get him out of conflict with his company commander.
The troops were still unaware of where they were going. Even the infamous Z symbol was kept secret until the last minute. Soldiers taped two horizontal white stripes to their vehicles on 19 February, and only added the diagonal of the Z hours before the invasion started.
D-day
At 04:00 on 24 February, Filatyev awoke to the sound of rocket artillery.
“I hear a roar, a rumble, a vibration of the earth, I feel a sharp smell of gunpowder in the air, I look out of the body [of the truck], throwing back the awning, I see that the sky has become bright… To the right and left of our column the rocket artillery was working, powerful volleys of long-range guns were heard from somewhere behind us, the air felt anxious and buoyant, sleep vanished… I could not understand what was happening, who was shooting at whom and from where. Tiredness vanished along with the lack of food, water and sleep … I couldn’t fully understand what was going on, are we firing at the advancing Ukrainians? Maybe on NATO?”
Nobody told him what was happening. “My level is that of a contract paratrooper, which is the level of a stallion being led to castration,” Filatyev writes bitterly. He was simply expected to follow orders without explanation. “So it’s the same with the army for a contract worker, go there, go there, good for you, go there now and at one beautiful moment it will fuck you up, [that’s how] you’ve been trained.”
The Russian column passed through the town of Armyansk on the border between Crimea and Ukraine proper. Filatyev’s truck, carrying a cargo of mortar rounds in crates, had no working brakes. Along the way it crashed once and endured other near-misses. Filatyev saw “combat planes flying over us, followed by attack helicopters, explosions could be heard ahead, the air smelling of gunpowder. The picture was both fascinatingly frightening and disturbingly beautiful.” Soon they crossed the border, passing a captured checkpoint.
After some distance, they received an order to take combat positions. “We all rush out of the trucks and run to the sides of the road taking up fighting positions, some of us kneeling, some of us lying down, and some of us just standing because we don’t want to get dirty.” It was a false alert.
They resumed their journey through Ukrainian villages with yellow-and-blue painted fences, past “sullen huddled lads and single old men baptizing our column” – making the sign of the cross, likely intended as a curse. Even now, hours into the invasion, the commanders had still not explained what was happening and who they were fighting. “The soldiers in our column are also wondering where and why we are going, it can be seen on their tired and somewhat confused faces, but what to do?”
As they drove on at “minimum speed” towards Kherson, Filatyev became alarmed at seeing an unusual-looking KAMAZ truck – possibly a command and control vehicle – near some seemingly abandoned-looking Soviet-era hangars, which had been disregarded by the advancing invaders. “My gut feeling told me of danger … Logic said that the scouts and attack aircraft were ahead and if they didn’t notice the oddity, then everything was OK. But I was wrong again, logic and the modern Russian Army are not compatible.”
As the trucks drove past, “indiscriminate shooting” broke out. The column was ordered to take combat positions again, this time for real. It was Filatyev’s first taste of combat in the Ukraine war.
In the next instalment, I’ll cover Filatyev’s description of the chaotic and disorganised Russian advance on Kherson and his experience of the fighting that preceded Russia’s capture of the city.
Advance to Kherson
Source: TW
Paratrooper Pavel Filatyev became one of the first members of the Russian invasion force to enter Ukraine on the morning of 24 February 2022. This 🧵 continues his first-hand account of the Russian capture and occupation of Kherson in southern Ukraine.
A few hours after crossing the border, Filatyev’s unit found itself under fire from Ukrainians near Kherson. Filatyev had been assigned to a mortar unit, but had the problem of knowing nothing about mortars. He made himself useful by carrying weapons and ammunition. “They’re fucking heavy, what the fuck. I don’t need this mortar!” As bullets impacted the ground around him, Russian troops stormed and captured the Ukrainian position. It was only a brief skirmish and the advance soon resumed.
By the early afternoon, the paratroopers had reached a sandy wooded area, probably the Oleshky Sands nature reserve south-east of Kherson. Filatyev learned that they were carrying out a flanking manoeuvre against the city while the main force went a different route. Their vehicles began to break down. “The equipment was simply abandoned on the road, and its crews sat down with others.” The thawing ground, melting earlier in the south than in Ukraine’s colder north, proved another obstacle when they tried to drive off-road. “Our trucks got stuck in the mud, and there was a sort of invisible depression where the snow had long since melted but the water in the ground had not dried and there was an invisible marshland.”
Armoured personnel carriers and heavy trucks loaded with ammunition got stuck in the mud, and more vehicles got stuck when they tried to tow out the stuck ones. The entire column ground to a halt in a highly vulnerable position. In the end, they abandoned the stuck trucks. Filatyev could hear the sound of incoming artillery on the other side of the hill. He sought to find out what was happening, but found that everyone he asked “had no energy anymore (some were sleeping in their vehicles), or it was just banal, as usual, ‘who gives a fuck’.”
He reported to his regiment’s deputy commander: “Comrade [Lieutenant] Colonel, there is a battle going on over the hill, two or three kilometres at the most, signal flares and smoke [signals] were launched, red and white.” He asked what it meant. The lieutenant colonel, who had blood on his uniform from dealing with a casualty, looked at him. “After a pause, looking now into my eyes and then up the hill, he said, ‘I don’t know what the fuck that means, get the fuck out of here!’” Filatyev duly got out of there.
Nobody knew who was fighting who – communications with the rest of the invasion force had already broken down, less than 12 hours into the operation. The column eventually moved off again before halting for the night, again in a highly vulnerable position. Filatyev and his comrades spent a sleepless night but the feared Ukrainian counterattacks did not come. He wondered if this meant “that things were not so bad and the [Ukrainian forces] were either really doing even worse than we were, or we were now falling into a trap.”
The Ukrainians were indeed doing very badly, but the Russians were also taking casualties – from their own side. One man was shot from behind with the bullet penetrating his body armour and killing him. Another died after having his leg badly broken by a rotating gun turret. The dying man was put in Filatyev’s truck but was not evacuated. “Instead of evacuating him to a hospital with wonderful and caring nurses, as in American films, we drove him farther and farther behind enemy lines on boxes with mines in a ‘Ural’ truck that had no brakes.”
There were more serious incidents elsewhere. An artillery unit got ahead of the main force and had to turn back. Like many other units, its communications had broken down. With its Z-symbols invisible in the dark, it was spotted and mistakenly attacked by its own side. “200s [killed], 300s [wounded] [were left behind], others fled in a panic in the dark”, Filyatev writes. Several of the survivors escaped into the woods and fields “and the next day came out to our people”.
The column drove on towards Kherson, though more villages flying Ukrainian flags. “These flags were striking and aroused mixed feelings of respect for the courageous patriotism of these people and a sense that these colours now belong to the enemy”. Filatyev eventually met up with his old company, who were shaken by their experiences so far: “‘Fuck, it’s fucked up,’ ‘We’ve been fucking around all night, you got a smoke?’, ‘I was picking up bodies off the road, there’s one with his brains on the pavement.’” Now the column “rushed at high speed in the direction of Kherson”. Filatyev passed “broken, burned or abandoned Ukrainian equipment. It was old Soviet equipment even worse than ours - BTRs, BRDMs, GAZs, Ural trucks, old OSA-type air defence systems.”
Filatyev worried about likely Ukrainian resistance.
“I don’t think that the mayor of the city will come out with bread and salt, raise the flag of the Russian Federation over the administration building, and we will enter the city in a parade column… Kherson is a large city, if we drive there in a column, then we are fucked. I knew our level of preparation and organization and prepared for the worst. How bad must things be in the Ukrainian army that our command decided that we would swoop down on this city?”
Suddenly, Ukrainian GRAD MLRS launchers were reportedly spotted ahead. The column abruptly turned around and drove back the way it came at maximum speed, stopping in a forest to set up defensive positions. Filatyev’s unit brought several Ukrainian prisoners with it.
Into Kherson
No attack came. After another cold night, a tank column from the 33rd motorized rifle regiment arrived at Filatyev’s position. The defences had been arranged so haphazardly that “if [the Ukrainians] reached us and drove past, half of us would shoot each other…” He tried to “find a position to avoid being shot at by my own people” but gave up when he realised that it was “almost impossible”. In the late afternoon, the column set off again and crossed the Antonivskyi Bridge to Kherson. Filatyev began to see the signs of recent battle.
Destroyed Ukrainian equipment stood on the road alongside broken-down Russian armoured vehicles and trucks, which had been abandoned. “The sun began to recede sharply, everything turned grey, [there was] the smell of gunpowder and smoke.” The vehicles slowed down to a crawl, “making them perfect targets for air and artillery. How fucked up must the Ukrainian Armed Forces be that they haven’t fucked us up yet? This huge convoy … was an ideal target for aircraft and artillery.”
Men jumped out of their vehicles to loot roadside shops, grabbing cigarettes, crisps and soda. Filatyev’s unit was ordered to bypass the city centre and seize Kherson Airport, to the northwest of the city. After they had set up an HQ there, a firefight started on the runway.
“A big explosion lit up the place… a KAMAZ [truck] on the runway exploded, I don’t know how many vehicles are on fire, people scatter, fall to the ground, some take up positions … everything explodes again, I see the terminal building, I can hear the machine guns.”
But it was just another friendly fire incident.
“About 10 minutes later I realise it’s not an ambush and no one’s attacking us right now … it’s not clear if there’s any dead or wounded, a couple of the vehicles burnt to a crisp, the explosions have stopped, it’s dawn.”
The men dug positions right in front of their ammunition trucks, which worried Filatyev. “Everyone starts arguing and everyone picks his own foxhole, so we end up chaotically entrenched in front of the cars, 30 metres away from them, and I realise that’s suicide.”
On 28 February, orders came to attack Kherson and take its seaport, on its south side. The column headed slowly into the city. Along the way, Filatyev passed Tigr high-mobility vehicles,
“seemingly with Kadyrov’s men [from Chechyna], we greet each other with a show of hands. … I find out that from different directions, the rest of the troops from our 7th division, our Parachute Battalion, each unit has its own direction and point that needs to be taken, we’re assigned the seaport. Are we really going to be ordered to enter the city at night?”
To Filatyev’s alarm, his unit repeatedly encountered Ukrainian civilians with smartphones who were apparently tracking their movements. One detainee was found to be subscribed to “a Telegram group in which people were uploading information, photos … and videos of how many where and when they saw troops. We’re being monitored online and a lot of civilians are involved. Doesn’t add to the positivity, the atmosphere is shit, there’s nothing to eat, the mortar team left without sleeping bags and dry ration packs.”
The Russians began to arrest civilians. Filatyev caught a man who “smells like diesel” after reeds near their positions burst into flames. Across a dried-up river, he could hear shouts of “Glory to Ukraine”. He saw a young girl near his position and inspected her smartphone.
“I watch instant messages … in the spirit of ‘Where are you?’, ‘I’m there then’, ‘There are soldiers everywhere’, ‘Here (address) also soldiers’, … I did not read further and gave it back to her, it became again somehow disgusting from all this shit.”
Filatyev insists that his unit treated the prisoners well: “I can’t speak for the rest of the army, but I didn’t see anyone get beaten up, much less raped.” But it’s not clear what became of them afterwards.
After a freezing night, the column continued into the city centre on the morning of 1 March. Heavy gunfire and explosions could be heard.
“The city was grey, with the smell of gunpowder everywhere, gunfire and explosions, something was burning, somewhere was smoky … Civilians were almost invisible, as if the city had died out, the snow with wind and rain emphasised the gloom.”
But Filatyev’s column encountered no resistance, and by 17:30 had reached the seaport. Kherson had fallen to the Russians.
In the next installment, I’ll cover Filatyev’s experience of the Russian forces’ disastrous attempt to advance from Kherson to Mykolaiv, during which he suffered the eye injury that was to take him out of the war. /end
To Mykolaiv
Source: TW
On 1 March 2022, Russian forces seized the Ukrainian city of Kherson. Among them was paratrooper Pavel Filatyev, who subsequently wrote a scathing 141-page memoir about his experiences. This 🧵 continues his account of the disastrous Russian advance on Mykolaiv.
“Have you seen the paintings ‘Barbarians in Rome’ [sic]? This best illustrates what was happening,” writes Filatyev of his arrival at Kherson’s seaport in the early evening of 1 March. His unit took over an administrative building at the port.
“Everyone looked exhausted and feral, everyone started searching the buildings for food, water, showers, and places to sleep, and some started carrying computers and anything else of value they could find.”
He helped himself to some fresh clothes and champagne. Filatyev writes that he was “disgusted by the hauling around of household appliances.” He understood, though, why some did it: “What’s so surprising that someone couldn’t resist grabbing trophies in the form of a computer if their salary doesn’t allow them to buy it?”
He watched the Ukrainian TV news to learn what was going on elsewhere.
“All I understood was that Russian troops are advancing from all directions, Odessa, Kharkov, Kiev are occupied, they began to show footage of broken buildings and injured women and children. … I felt sorry for all the dead and wounded, especially civilians, but the news gave me a little optimism, if only our people would take Kiev, Odessa and Kharkov faster, so that all this shit would end sooner.”
The soldiers discovered a kitchen in the offices. After enduring a month without washing or having normal food, “we ate everything like savages, all that was there – cereal, oatmeal, jam, honey, coffee. Everything was turned upside down and we ate everything we could find.”
The Russians had taken over Kherson with minimal casualties, though sporadic shooting was continuing. The occupation force found itself having to deal with nearly 300,000 angry civilians. This worried Filatyev, who had no training in dealing with them.
“There is some anger [from the soldiers] towards civilians, of course I understand that we are uninvited guests here, but for their own safety they’d better stay away from us. This is not our specialisation, we are not Rosgvardiya [National Guard] or OMON [riot police]. No one wants to explain to civilians ‘why the fuck did we come here’, we just do not know ourselves, the command gives orders at the last moment.”
Filatyev himself dealt roughly with one man, hitting him in the head with the butt of his rifle while arresting him. The Russian commanders opened negotiations with local politicians for a peaceful transfer of power. OMON and Rosgvardiya arrived on 2 March to deal with the civilians. Mercenaries from the Wagner Group’s openly far-right and neo-Nazi Rusich unit also provided security. On 3 March, to Filatyev’s dismay, his unit received orders to leave Kherson’s seaport and join a force heading north to take Mykolaiv and Odesa. “Do they really not understand at the top that people are exhausted?” Nonetheless, they returned to their trucks and headed out.
It was soon clear that they were heading into a full-scale battle. Dismounting from their trucks, they advanced on foot across fields, under artillery bombardment, and reached an abandoned Ukrainian position, which they used for cover while shells and missiles flew overhead.
“Around us were abandoned positions and equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, boxes of Javelins and abandoned Ukrainian infantry fighting vehicles. There was shooting and explosions near us but a little ahead, who, where, what is not clear.”
Nobody seemed to be in charge.
“When it began to get dark, our UAZ cars began to drive back past us. Stopping them and asking what’s up there, I understood that … they got into a fight, there were well-fortified Ukrainian positions ahead, it seemed that our troops were retreating randomly.”
After a sleepless night and rumours that the battalion commander was dead, Filatyev and his comrades dug positions in a belt of forest on the road to Mykolaiv. They came under artillery bombardment, killing and wounding several of the paratroopers.
“Hiding in a wooded area under a large tree, someone is saying to an officer hiding behind the same tree, ‘Comrade Major, what should we do?’ The answer is: ‘I don’t know what the fuck to do, I’m not a commander, I’m a political officer!’”
They fled back to their trucks.
“Back in the vehicles, all driving haphazardly backwards, on the way I see the [2S9 Nona self-propelled guns] of the parachute battalion taking up positions, firing towards Nikolaevsk. In general there is a feeling that everyone is retreating chaotically.”
Filatyev saw Russian helicopters flying back from Mykolaiv, and later learned that at least five of them had ben shot down there. “We drove back, I couldn’t understand a fucking thing.” The shooting stopped on someone’s orders, giving him some unexpected hope.
“I got the impression that maybe we made peace… The commander said March 8th would be celebrated at home, and a couple of days ago I saw on TV … how they were bombing Kiev and Kharkov, and there was a rumor that the marines had taken Odessa.”
The paratroopers retreated all the way to Kherson airport, where they reoccupied their previously dug trenches. They were reinforced with fresh artillery and infantry units, though the latter gave Filatyev no confidence at all.
“The infantry were strangely dressed, old helmets and old camouflage, … mobilized from the [Donetsk People’s Republic]. We looked down on them realizing that they would be of no use to us, most of them were were about 45 years old and were dragged here by force.”
Rumours also swirled that “the motorized infantry is refusing en masse to go, maybe that’s why we don’t get a chance to rest. There was anger at the refuseniks.” The following day, the Russians made a second attempt to take Mykolaiv, once again coming under heavy fire. They took up positions somewhere on the border between the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions. Despite their small numbers, they were spread out over 20km of front lines. The advance ground to a halt under heavy bombardment, with Filatyev’s mortar unit losing half its men in a day.
The paratroopers remained entrenched for the next month. “It was Groundhog Day,” writes Filatyev. Ukrainian artillery fired at the Russians, the Russian artillery fired at the Ukrainians, and the soldiers on both sides stayed in their trenches and endured the bombardment.
“Our air support was almost invisible. We just held our positions in the trenches at the front line, not washing, not eating, not sleeping normally. Everyone was covered in beards and dirt, uniforms and boots fell apart.”
There was nothing to eat but dry rations. Then the rations were limited to one pack per person every 2 days. Then the rations ran out.
“After some time, some smart guy upstairs decided to put a field kitchen behind our position … Because of it, the shelling increased.”
The field kitchen food was largely inedible and most of the soldiers didn’t eat it. Drones were another ever-present hazard. “Not a single clever person with stars had thought to prohibit the daily movement of vehicles, which increased the bombardment …
“From drones it was visible where the vehicle was going and it was very likely that the bombardment would follow, so almost all [incoming] equipment was destroyed.”
The Ukrainians counter-attacked, but the Russians held on. They endured increasingly miserable conditions. Soldiers began to shoot themselves in their limbs or otherwise injure themselves to “get out of this hellhole”. “Almost everyone got fungus, some got loose teeth and their skin was peeling.” The men got “angrier and angrier”. Some started drinking heavily.
They blamed their leadership. “Many were discussing how when they returned they were going to have to make the command answer for the [lack of] provision and illiterate leadership.” They blamed the Ukrainians, whose radio broadcasts they listened to.
The Russians were particularly angry at the Ukrainians for depicting them as violent, brutal ‘orcs’. So they took out their frustrations on a Ukrainian prisoner of war by cutting off his fingers and genitals.
At the start of April, the Russian army group attacking Kyiv withdrew. Filatyev’s unit was told it was a ‘gesture of goodwill’ and that peace talks were underway. “I immediately said that is bullshit, no one would have brought them out like that, so the losses [must be] big.”
The terrors of trench warfare profoundly affected Filatyev.
“Every time there was an artillery barrage, I pressed my head into the ground and [thought], ‘God, if I survive, I’ll do anything to change this!’ I don’t know how, but I wanted all those responsible for the fuck-ups and messes in our army to be to be punished. I wasn’t scared to die, I was offended to give up my life so ridiculously, I was hurt for all those who had given their lives and health for what, for whom?”
Hospital
The war ended for Filatyev a couple of weeks later.
“By mid-April, I got dirt in my eyes due to artillery fire … and keratitis started. After five days of torment, due to the threat of losing an eye, when the eye was already closed, I was evacuated.”
Filatyev was taken to hospital for treatment. In the next instalment, I’ll cover what happened to him there, and how he turned to anti-war activism after he learned why Russia had gone to war.
Source: TW
After a hellish month under bombardment in the trenches of southern Ukraine in March-April 2022, Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatyev suffered an eye injury and was evacuated to hospital. This 🧵 describes how he became an anti-war activist after learning why Russia went to war.
Dirt from a nearby shell explosion led to Filatyev contracting keratitis in mid-April 2022, resulting in his evacuation to a military hospital in Sevastopol. Paramedics at the front line had been unable to treat him, or for that matter anyone else, due to a lack of supplies.
The paramedic who authorised his evacuation “asked me to tell the medical unit that he doesn’t have any syringes and painkillers, there’s not even that on the front line”. Filatyev notes that Russian first-aid kits included only a tourniquet, bandage and Promidol tablets. Leaving the front line brought to an end “two months of mud, hunger, cold, sweat and the sensation of death.” He travelled with 20 others on a five-hour bus journey back to Crimea.
“The feeling you get when you leave a war zone is indescribable,” he wrote. For Filatyev, “it was at that point that I finally relaxed and thought about the last two months of my life, what it was all about, why I needed it, whether I’d done something good or bad, why I was part of it and how and why I was there in the first place.”
The evacuees were met by a medical detachment “mainly consisting of Dagestani women who greeted us with warmth … One could feel the care and compassion from these women, it was a very strange and already forgotten feeling.”
The hospital where Filatyev was taken “was fresh, quiet and cozy, after the trenches it seemed to me that it was better than in hotels like the Radisson or Hilton.” He was evaluated and transferred to another, much older, hospital for treatment along with other casualties.
Filatyev was struck by the difference between the two facilities. The Soviet-era hospital was shabby and run-down with one toilet between 40 patients. “There’s a massive shortage of doctors in the old, ramshackle hospital, full of wounded in the corridors.”
The propaganda he saw on Russian TV in the hospital contradicted his own experiences and those of his fellow wounded. “Watching the news on TV, I could not understand why there is no truth there, the war is almost sanctified and I do not see any objectivity.” He watched the news about the sinking of the missile cruiser Moskva with a survivor. The TV news claimed it had sunk after an accidental explosion, but the sailor told FIlatyev that “two [missiles] hit the hull, the ship began to burn, the crew were evacuated, but not all.”
Discharge
After being discharged from the hospital, he was sent to a barracks for the recently wounded. “There were a hundred people there who had returned from the war and were coming undone after what they had experienced.”
One man, a BMP-3 driver, was the sole survivor of a Javelin strike. “The little guy stuttered terribly, uttered one word in 5 to 10 seconds, he said that they wanted to send him to the nuthouse, but he fought back, wrote a refusal of medical assistance and is going home.”
The injured soldiers received 3 million rubles ($50,000) each in compensation for their wounds, a payment they derisively nicknamed “Putinskimi”. Many spent the money straight away on prostitutes and alcohol, “blowing 100 grand a night (some don’t go home for up to 10 days)”.
Filatyev was granted two weeks’ leave on condition that he return “to save the Nazi-occupied Ukraine”. He still felt unwell, with many pains in his body, and his injured eye was still not working properly. He went to a private hospital and paid for another examination. He was diagnosed with hernias, various musculoskeletal problems and neurasthenia. But the reality was that “in the military hospitals, this is generally considered healthy, they won’t treat it."+++(5)+++ So he had to pay for medical treatment and medicines at his own expense.
“For two months I tried to get treatment from the army, went to the prosecutor’s office, went to the command, to the head of the hospital, wrote to the president. No one cares, no one helped. No insurance, no medical treatment.”
He attempted to transfer out of the airborne forces on health grounds but was refused. Eventually he decided to approach the Medical-Military Commission (VVK) for a medical discharge. But this was not successful either.
“After I submitted my documents and went to the doctors, no one sent me an appointment for a medical examination for a month. As a result, they say that they lost my documents … The command said that I was evading service and sent the documents to the prosecutor’s office to initiate a criminal case, not caring that they were preventing me from going through a medical examination.”
Filatyev blamed his problems on his unit’s political officer, who had also ended up in hospital after drunkenly crashing his vehicle.
“Just yesterday, he got cocky with impunity and just stood there in front of everybody, stood there and said he didn’t care … Apparently they’ve been given carte blanche from above. Their goal, for the sake of a new star [i.e. promotion], is to throw as many people back [to the front lines] as possible, albeit without training or equipment.”
Switching sides
Filatyev had largely been cut off from information while he was at the front. Now, “gaining access to the telephone and Internet, I greedily absorbed information from everywhere.” But he found that “our federal sources were dry and hiding the truth about some other reality.” Filatyev felt an “internal dialogue of a cocktail of conscience, patriotism and common sense”. He was angry at bloggers and YouTubers saying that they were ashamed to be Russians and ashamed of Putin’s army. “We are not Putin’s army, we are the army of Russia”, he writes.
“We swore an oath to the Russian people, and … if you can’t get your shit together and go with other people to demand the government (which you elected) abolish the war, then all this shit is on your hands too. Russia is not Putin, Russia is people with RF passports. … Where were you while we were dying, maimed and suffering deprivation? Where?! You were afraid for your comfort and you couldn’t come out to the administration building and say “No to war!” for fear of getting an administrative penalty.”
Filatyev also systematically rejects the Russian government’s justifications for war. Finland was joining NATO, Japan claimed Russian territory, Turkey had shot down a Russian plane, yet Russia had not attacked any of those countries.
Ukraine was also on the defensive in the Donbas. “So it is not true that Ukraine was going to attack Russia either.” He did not blame the Ukrainians for opposing the region’s separatism. “[What if] Karelia wanted to become part of Finland, … Yakutia to the USA?”
Filatyev rejects the claims of Ukraine being under ‘Nazi’ rule. None of the people he had met in Ukraine before the war
“could remember a specific case of someone being hurt or humiliated for having a Russian surname or not being able to speak Ukrainian. Communicating with people who escaped from the war in Donetsk and in Lugansk, I have not heard any cases of Nazism that are being shouted about in our media. But they all said that they were fleeing the war and that they just want to live and work in peace.”
By now, Filatyev no longer wanted to fight.
“Back in Russia I struggled with the strange feeling that I was against the war and that I felt sorry for the people of Ukraine and that I was drawn back, because the most real life opens up in front of in the face of death. When you know that at any moment you’ll be gone, only at that moment do you understand what life is and how beautiful the world is. I was ashamed to be safe while others sacrifice themselves … We’ve all become hostage to many factors, such as revenge, patriotism, money, duty, career, fear of the state.”
Filatyev condemns the “rabid ones” of both sides who were calling for the destruction of Russia or Ukraine, such as the Russian TV host Vladimir Solovyov.
“The propaganda on both sides only adds fuel to the fire by openly calling for us to destroy each other… Wake up, we are human beings, we are Orthodox, we are not different, we are not enemies, we are pitted like dogs in the arena and we feel the blood and we can’t stop! Now is the moment when we have to tell the truth, and the truth is that the majority in both Russia and Ukraine do not want to kill each other. And while this majority sits in silence, more and more people are drawn into the war.”
He blames the war on those responsible for Russia’s notorious kleptocracy.
“All they can do is send their children and mistresses to study and live in the West! Get citizenship there and enjoy real justice there! They want everything that is there! But they are not able to create anything like this in Russia, all they did was plunder and plunder the country, thinking only of themselves! All these reforms and initiatives served only to enrich those who controlled the budget.”
Filatyev also appeals to Christian values to oppose the war.
“I believe in God, but I do not see God in our [Russian Orthodox] church, which has forgotten the main commandment “Do not kill” and blesses us to kill our Orthodox brothers. We had no moral right to attack another country,”
Filatyev concludes,
“especially the people closest to us … Russian roots are from Kiev, Ukrainians and Russians are the same people, we have many family ties. That is why we were hated by everyone in Ukraine, because the betrayal of a ‘relative’ is much more painful than an outsider.”
He explains his decision to write his memoir as being necessary to “voice what I think”.“I realise that this gesture of peace will cost me dearly, but I can’t shut up my conscience. I’m sure a ‘just’ court will give me up to life in prison, tell me I’ve been bought and I’m an agent of the West, but I can’t look at it all in silence anymore.”
He concludes his memoir with the slogan “НЕТ ВОЙНЕ!” – “NO WAR!”.
In the next and final instalment, I’ll look at Filatyev’s detailed comments on the Russian military system, which provide an interesting insider’s view of what’s gone wrong with the Russian army and has led to its catastrophically poor performance in the war. /end