After more than six months of war, first-hand accounts of Russian front-line soldiers appear. The most detailed is from Filatyev, who hastily wrote a 104-page memoir about two months of fighting called “Zov”, which he then uploaded to the Russian social network VK.

“I could not throw down my weapon and run away, because for a soldier this is cowardice. Not everyone understands this, but we are hostages of our own patriotism,” he said in an interview with Al Jazeera.

“I decided that if I was going to get out alive, I was going to do everything I could to stop it. I decided that the best thing I could do was write everything down: what I think I feel when I felt fear – without any exaggerated heroism,” he said.

Filatiev wanted to show Russian readers what he was saying was the truth, compared to what they could see on TV.

Filatiev comes from a military family.

His father served in Chechnya, where he himself would later be stationed, during his first assignment in the Air Force from 2007 to 2010.

Last year, in search of a reliable income, he re-enrolled in his father’s old department. While in Crimea, he saw firsthand the chronic shortage of equipment, which is the result of widespread corruption in the supply chain.

The equipment that was there was old and worn

“I only got the bulletproof vest at the last minute before crossing the border,” he said. “Everyone knows such cases when 10 people are sent away with two helmets and two bulletproof vests and told to be on their own. The situation is so absurd that many people buy clothes, equipment, and shoes before going to war.”

Having moved from the Crimea to the territory of Ukraine at the end of February, Filatyev’s unit occupied the city of Kherson, meeting little resistance.

Then the paratroopers were ordered to march to Mykolaiv, camped in the forest, which was fired upon by Ukrainian artillery, killing several of Pavel’s comrades. For the next month, the situation was at an impasse, as Russian forces trying to capture the city were held up in the trenches by fierce Ukrainian resistance.

“We waited for a week, with nowhere to sleep, nowhere to wash, constantly under fire, and we didn’t understand why we weren’t being rotated,” said Filatiev. “You have to live and sleep in the ground, under constant bombardment. But you get used to it. You were sleeping even when an explosion rang out a hundred meters away,” he says.

As a result, he spent a month in the trenches.

The war ended for him after an artillery blast caused an eye infection and he was evacuated to a hospital in Crimea. There he finally had a chance to watch television and compare how he experienced the war with how it was portrayed on the news.

About rape, robbery and theft: I only took from abandoned shops

After 21-year-old corporal Danylo Frolkin confessed to shooting a civilian in the head and stealing from peasants’ houses, and his commanders participated in organized truck robberies, Filatyev tried to distance himself from his comrades in arms who committed such serious crimes. crimes

“Many people in Ukraine do not believe me and try to present all of us paratroopers as “Orcs”, but I pass a lie detector test. No one in my unit in the two months I was there was involved in a single murder, “, – he declared.

“No one raped anyone, did not shoot or anything like that. [Dar] since we didn’t have anything to eat or drink, when we came across abandoned shops, we took water, cigarettes and food,” he claims.