A Russian tank officer who was captured after one month fighting in Ukraine was found to have been filming a home movie about the invasion on his mobile phone.
The footage, in which he talks about comrades being turned into ‘scraps of meat’ and ‘mince’, offers an astonishing insight into Moscow’s spluttering invasion as his gun jams, his vehicle explodes and a raid on a Ukrainian military base goes wrong.
It was filmed by Yuri Shalaev – a 23-year-old lieutenant who trained at Moscow’s top military academy and was stationed in Chechnya before the war – in defiance of Kremlin orders to avoid using personal mobile phones on security grounds.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Kyiv’s interior ministry, says: ‘This is very rare since 95 per cent of the occupiers do not take their phones and if they do, very few of them have smartphones, since most come from poorer regions of Russia. It is significant since it shows the callous actions and chaotic military approach of…