DPA
For two months, former Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatyev experienced the war in Ukraine first-hand, battling a determined enemy and despairing at a senseless mission and the incompetence of his own commanders.
After he returned home in the summer, Filatyev, 34, poured out his frustrations about the shambolic state of the Russian army in his gripping front-line account “ZOV”, which means “the call” in Russian.
Packed with insights into daily wartime life and an army riddled with corruption and nepotism, the 141-page bombshell was recently released in German and is also available in English as “ZOV: A Russian soldier caught inside Putin’s unjust war in Ukraine”.
Initially published in Russian on the Internet, the first word of its title was then also written in Latin script to highlight the letters “Z” and “V”, the tactical symbols painted on Russian military vehicles that poured into Ukraine on February 24.
The memoir quickly became an international sensation, while Filatyev, who keeps his whereabouts secret while in political asylum in France, faces up to 15 years in jail in Russia for defaming the armed forces.
Nevertheless, he hopes his writing will help to enlighten his countrymen about the senselessness of the war, and even prompt them to rise up in opposition to it. The Russian audio book version published on YouTube alone has more than 600,000 hits so far.
As his unit, the 56th Guards air assault regiment, was sent into southern Ukraine from Crimea, Filatyev naively believed there was a reason for the invasion. He soon realized that nobody there was waiting for the “liberation” that was announced by the Kremlin.
The claim of the Russian leadership that they wanted to preempt an imminent Ukrainian attack is also untrue, says Filatyev, denouncing what President Vladimir Putin stubbornly calls a “special military operation” against Nazis in the neighbouring country.
His criticism is not aimed at ordinary soldiers who have been misled by a lack of information, Filatyev stresses, but at the leadership in the Moscow Kremlin.
“He never served, he was never in a war and doesn’t know what the army is,” Filatyev said of Putin, a former Soviet KGB intelligence service officer, during a video call from a café in Paris.
As the world reels from each successive uncovering of horrors against civilians in previously occupied Bucha, Izyum, Kherson and beyond, he says he can’t personally confirm any atrocities committed by the army during his time in Ukraine.
“Of course I can’t vouch for the whole army, but no one was tortured in front of my eyes, let alone raped,” he writes. But he has no doubt that, as in every war, there are “scumbags” committing war crimes. At the same time, he acknowledges that Ukrainian civilians are being killed and entire cities senselessly destroyed.
Filatyev, a former horse breeder as well as soldier, authentically describes how the military is failing due to a lack of leadership and motivation – and sheer inability to keep the troops supplied with essentials like food.
“I’m a smoker and I’m annoyed with the leadership that we’ve been here for three days and apparently nobody upstairs thought that we need something to smoke, eat and drink,” he writes in his diary-like notes from the front.
Dilapidated equipment and vehicles that constantly break down point to a bleak outcome for Russia’s “technically hopelessly outdated and morally rotten” forces in Ukraine: “An army like this doesn’t need an enemy, we’ll ruin ourselves all on our own.”
Filatyev, who is not married and has no children, paints a dire future also for the country, which is sinking in “lies, fraud and false values”. Everything is atrophied, from defence to health care to the legal system, while the individual counts for nothing.
Ordinary soldiers often have to pay for their medical treatment and medicines themselves, but the Russian elites continue to prosper from the comfort of their villas and yachts.
After years of watching annual WW2 victory parades on Red Square, this, he muses, this should surely be enough for the Russian people to finally grasp the tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine: “On May 9 we thank our ancestors who ended the war. Have we, their descendants, really started a war now?”
It is a war that not only tore apart Ukrainians and Russians, who once lived in one country and still have close family ties, but also threatens to bankrupt his homeland because of the immense cost of holding the occupied Ukrainian territory.
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