Out on the frontline, near the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman, on 8 November at 15.10, a Russian serviceman called Andrey decided to ignore the orders of his superiors and call his mother with an unauthorised mobile phone.
“No one feeds us anything, mum,” he complained. “Our supply is shit, to be honest. We draw water from puddles, then we strain it and drink it.”
Russian forces had been on the back foot in the Donetsk oblast for weeks. Lyman, taken by the Russians in May, was liberated by Ukrainian forces in October.
Two days before Andrey made his afternoon call back home, the Russian forces had “finally” started firing at Ukrainian positions with phosphorus bombs, he told his mother, but the promises of munitions that could turn the battle had come to nothing.
“Where are the missiles that Putin boasted about?” he asked. “There is a high-rise building right in front of us. Our soldiers can’t hit it. We need one Caliber cruise missile and that’s it.”
Andrey reassured his mother, who lives in Kostroma, a city 310 miles north-east of Moscow, that he would be OK. “I always say prayers Mum,” he said. “Every morning.”
It is not known whether those prayers were met. When approached by the Guardian his mother said her son was not with her, before breaking down in tears and putting the phone down.
The content of the conversation between soldier and mother, which lasted five minutes and 26 seconds, can be heard and read today because it was intercepted by the Ukrainian military and passed to this newspaper.
Others shared with the Guardian, include a conversation on 6 November between a father and the colleagues of his son, Andrei, who had been killed serving in the 35th motorised rifle brigade, 5th company.
“Reinforcements: no; communication: no”, responded a soldier to questions from the grieving parent about the status of the men who had survived a Ukrainian onslaught. “They said we weren’t allowed to retreat. Otherwise, we may be shot.”
In a third intercept from 26 October a soldier in the Donetsk region tells his wife how he had fled with three others from the bloodshed and was contemplating surrender. “I’m in a sleeping bag, all wet, coughing, generally fucked up,” he said. “We were all allowed to be slaughtered.” The soldier’s wife declined to comment when approached by this newspaper.
They are just three of thousands of calls between soldiers in the trenches or advanced positions that Ukrainian experts have eavesdropped, pored over for snippets of intelligence and then, where there is propaganda value, made public.
In the first period of the war, such was the lack of security around Russian communications that conversations about strategy between military commanders were being picked up, even by amateurs, thanks to the military’s use of open radio frequencies.
That, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, a cyber-expert who heads the Silverado Policy Accelerator, is increasingly rare.
A raft of media articles based on intercepts chronicling human rights abuses in Bucha, the town north of Kyiv where civilians were allegedly shot, and the increasingly poor morale within the military, has resulted in Russian forces sharpening up their act – to a degree, as the Andrey call has highlighted.
“You still have a lot of soldiers bringing cellphones to the frontline who want to talk to their families and they are either being intercepted as they go through a Ukrainian telecommunications provider or intercepted over the air,” said Alperovitch. “That doesn’t pose too much difficulty for the Ukrainian security services.”
In themselves, a handful of intercepted calls offer limited value in painting a picture of the attitudes of the Russian fighting forces.
The huge scale of calls being made by soldiers does, however, provide a very clear steer as to the weaknesses of the Russian military, according to one former Kremlin defence official who asked to remain anonymous.
“Security has always been a mess, both in the army and among defence officials”, the source said. “For example, in 2013 they tried to get all the staff at the ministry of defence to replace our iPhones with Russian-made Yota smartphones.
“But everyone just kept using the iPhone as a second mobile because it was much better. We would just keep the iPhone in the car’s glove compartment for when we got back from work. In the end, the ministry gave up and stopped caring. If the top doesn’t take security very seriously, how can you expect any discipline in the regular army?”
At the end of September, Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 reservists and “those with previous military experience”.
The former Russian official said that this would only make the security situation worse. “Soldiers get a quick crash course on how not to give away sensitive information, but it is mostly for show,” the official said. “The commanders pretend to teach [the course] and the soldiers pretend to listen.
“Even now, we see that soldiers continue to use social media and tell their wives and mothers about the war, sometimes exposing their location.
“There is simply no discipline and it will only get worse now that they have mobilised 300,000 people who will be barely trained. Mobilised soldiers will be terrified of being in a war zone, and naturally, they will try to call home.”
The Ukrainian army, which for years has benefited from Nato-led training, has not been prone to such wide scale interception of communications.
The former Kremlin official said Putin was learning the hard way that his army was in dire need of modernisation and that the top-down Soviet style model was not fit for purpose.
“The army doctrine is based on punishment, so soldiers get penalised if they mess up, but no one is trying to prevent them from giving away information in the first place,” the source said. “Screw-ups will happen until they change the whole philosophy.”
