The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Service has released an intercept of a phone call between a Russian soldier and his grandmother in which he claims his unit massacred around 400 men, women and children in the Ukrainian city of Kreminna.
The unidentified soldier describes being given the order to capture the city, which was carried out in his own words by “f**king [killing] everybody including civilians, just everybody” in a massacre that lasted “from night to morning.”
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He adds: “Grandma, I’m telling you, we f**ked up [killed] not less than 400 people tonight.”
In one section of the conversation, he tries to justify the massacre by claiming the people he killed would kill him given the chance.
“We've got the nerve to go in; they’ll kill us,” he says. “At least I know I’m taking so many people with me.
“We also had machine gunners who started mowing down people – children, women, men, locals, and non-locals.
“They just wiped them all out. We went into houses and just shot. I just got fed up with everything.”
It’s not known exactly when the massacre took place but the city was occupied by Russian troops in April 2022.
Kreminna, in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk Oblast, was a thriving city of 20,000 people before the war.
Intercepted phone calls have provided numerous insights into the minds and thinking of Russians since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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In one intercepted conversation in March, Russian troops told of being forced into combat under the threat of being shot by their own side.
And in another last month, two prominent Russian businessmen complained that Russia “is in the clutches of a bunch of a**holes" and that eventually “people will be killing each other in the streets.”
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