A Russian commander ordered his soldiers to open fire and “take out” Ukrainian civilians near the besieged city of Mariupol, according to what Kyiv said was an intercepted radio conversation.
“There are two people coming out of the grove in civilian [clothes],” an unnamed Russian soldier says in an obscenity-strewn recording, which was made public by Ukraine’s SBU security service.
He also says that a vehicle has been spotted but it is unclear whether it is civilian or military. “Take them all f***ing out!” his superior screams in reply, adding that it was unimportant if there were non-combatants or not at the scene. “Off them all, f***!”
“Got it,” the soldier replies.
Judging by the soldiers’ comments, the incident is believed to have taken place in a village near
Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov. The port on the Dnieper river has been under siege and near-constant bombardment by President Putin’s forces for 40 days, and an estimated 120,000 residents are cut off without power and with dwindling supplies. According to local officials, 5,000 people have been killed by Russian shelling and airstrikes and 90 per cent of the city’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged — including homes, hospitals, schools and a theatre where hundreds of civilians had taken refuge.
Ukraine says it has been easy to intercept conversations between Russian forces because they are using outdated radio equipment or commercial walkie-talkies to communicate.
In the leaked recording, another Russian soldier can be heard complaining that he and his colleagues are vastly outnumbered and receiving no support from Moscow. “Their [Ukrainian] group has 150,000 [soldiers]! And there’s, f***, 3,000 of us, if that . . . They are on the left, on the right, encircling us, f***! There’s so many of them and so few of us. We don’t have any support, no aviation, not a f***ing thing.”
A separate leak revealed that to address declining morale and panic in the ranks, the Russian army had instructed commanders to restrict soldiers’ access to smartphones.
A military directive, revealed by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, states that “commanders of all ranks have faced opposition from personnel” who have been influenced by the “internet and popular messengers”.
“The security services have become aware of numerous cases of soldiers being blackmailed through their personal data and cases of soldiers being deceived with false information communicated to them personally through messenger apps such as Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram, Vkontakte and others,” according to the document.
In response the Russian army said it would exert “increased control” over use of the internet, limiting their use of social media on their mobile phones and subjecting them to check-ups of their “moral-psychological state”.
It also emerged yesterday that
Russia’s military had boasted about killing dozens of Ukrainian “deserters” who fled the devastated southern city.
Mikhail Mizintsev, a Russian colonel general, said last month that his forces had “liquidated” 93 alleged fighters who had tried to escape. He said they had been wearing civilian clothes when they were killed, according to RT, the Kremlin-backed media outlet. It was unclear how the Russian army knew they were servicemen and why they were not offered the chance to surrender.
Mizintsev, 59, who has been called the Butcher of Mariupol, is accused of a number of war crimes, including an attack on a maternity hospital and the theatre.
In another audio recording previously made public by Ukraine, Mizintsev, who heads
Russia’s National Defence Management Centre, said that a Russian soldier’s ear should be cut off as punishment for not wearing the correct uniform. Mizintsev was in charge of Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria, which flattened the city of Aleppo.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence said that most of the remaining residents of Mariupol had no electricity, communication, medicine, heating or water.
President Zelensky said that Russia was blocking humanitarian access to Mariupol because it wanted to hide evidence of “thousands” of people killed there. “The reason why we cannot get into Mariupol with the humanitarian cargo is precisely because they are afraid . . . that the world will see what is going on there,” he told Turkey’s Haberturk TV yesterday.
A convoy carrying more than 500 civilians from the area around Mariupol did reach Zaporizhzhya, about 140 miles to the north, yesterday in the largest evacuation so far. The International Committee of the Red Cross team led the convoy of buses and cars back to relative safety, having spent five days and four nights trying to reach Mariupol. They came within 12 miles of the city but conditions became too dangerous to enter.
Those arriving in Zaporizhzhya said they had witnessed suffering and death.