There have been an inordinate amount of inexplicably horrible incidents stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the latest from the front lines may be one of the most harrowing and awful things we’ve heard yet.
As a massive number of Russian troops continue to desert their posts, the army itself has been forced to set up a second “front line” to capture or kill their own retreating soldiers.
Ukrainian intelligence on Thursday released an audio recording that appears to capture in disturbing detail the mayhem and internal rifts between Russian troops on the battlefield. In the five-minute clip, described as an intercepted phone conversation between a Russian soldier and his wife, the man says he and the other men in his unit are a comfortable distance from the actual fighting.
“They moved us back to the second line, there’s shooting somewhere ahead of us, but we’re back here for now in the trenches,” he says, before boasting that he’d been lucky and found a “Rosneft jacket covered in blood, but warm.”
“They brought the inmates here… from prison. But they led them somewhere way up front. And we’re sitting here as a retreat-blocking detachment, f***. If someone runs back, we snuff them out.”
“What a nightmare,” his wife says.
And also:
“That’s how we have it set up. We sit on the second line, guarding the first. Behind us, there’s another line. If you go that way, you also won’t make it. So it’s impossible to run away. They shoot their own.”
“If someone goes [that way], you need to wipe him out,” he said.
The news comes just days after video surfaced of Russian soldiers at a forward military camp allegedly plotting a mutiny of sorts, belying the horrid morale of the Russian army.
