'Putin is a fool': New York Times reveals audio of Russian soldiers phoning home • FRANCE 24

The New York Times has obtained thousands of

audio

recordings of Russian

soldiers

talking to friends and family back

home

. The intercepted phone calls offer a kind of inside account of the failures on the battlefield and also of the civilian executions. There are over 4,000 recordings and I've isolated just a few of them for you to listen to, and listening to them was, uh, Douglas Herbert, our Foreign Affairs commentator, Doug, what's your reaction to some of those clips? Because from afar it sounds more like a Russian army in trouble and danger. It's amazing because we know that we have been told about the low morale of the Russian army in disarray that was retreating at the beginning of the war, now we hear it in the voices of these thousands of telephone conversations that the New York Times obtained from uh, enforcement agencies Ukrainian law enforcement officers while investigating atrocities earlier in the war in the Butchers region uh, that's absolutely what you just heard, it's the tip of the iceberg, you hear everything from Talking about civilians, Massacring Russians, essentially admitting to having killed and shot civilians in one.

In case you hear a soldier Sergey talking to his girlfriend, he says and I'm reading the quote, we detained them, stripped them and searched all their clothes, then a decision had to be made about letting them go, if we let them go, they could give them away . our position so it was decided to shoot them in the forest to which the girlfriend says yes he shot them, of course we shot them Sergey says girlfriend why didn't you take them as prisoners Sergey replies that we would have had to feed them uh and and we don't have enough food for ourselves, you see, I mean incredible, so you know, there is also talk of civil executions, uh, uh, these recordings paint, you know, a picture totally at odds with the rosy propaganda message that is broadcast night after night on Russian state television at

home

. a special operation that is going according to plan, you have a soldier saying in one of these conversations talking to his mother, mom, we haven't seen a single fascist here, obviously, a reference to Putin and all his officials constantly talking about the Nazis Ukrainians everywhere, um.

This war is based on a false pretense nobody uh nobody believed that any of this was necessary that is the soldier on the ground trying to tell his mother at home Mom I am here they are not fascists there are no Nazis anywhere there is talk of looting, we heard about

soldiers

in these villages taking over houses where Ukrainians had fled or were killed or shot and taking their televisions. In a conversation, you hear a soldier say: "to his partner or his wife saying: do you want?" a Samsung or an LG blenders appliances uh everything is fine to steal here uh construction tools literally loading them into cars they even found evidence of packages being sent uh in the days after the withdrawal from some of these cities and I'll just leave you with this, it's also He talks a lot about contempt for his superiors.

We heard one of them say that you know Putin is a

fool

because earlier one said that the damn superiors can't do anything and it turns out that they really don't know anything. they can only talk big in their uniforms, that was a soldier named Roman Roman talking to his partner and it goes on and on and on and yes, the testimony is quite extraordinary, firsthand testimony from Doug here from the New York Times, but many people you may be wondering. How did the New York Times manage to obtain thousands of these recordings? As I said, the New York Times strike to explain it to the reader.

How did we make our reports? How did we do it and they said they had exclusive access to Ukrainian law enforcement? actually tapping and listening to these cell phone communications, they were not blocked, they were not encrypted for some reason, they were able to collect all this, the New York Times obtained it from the Ukrainian authorities, so the normal thing is that if you are a viewer , you might be saying, "Oh, well, how do you know that Ukrainian law enforcement authorities didn't just make these phone calls? They're all fake, no, they weren't the New York Times' visual investigations team." They have a special team dedicated to this for months, they verified authenticated, it's 22 phones that were shared among dozens of soldiers, it took them two months to translate and authenticate all of this, it was basically based on cross-reference authentication.

Outgoing and incoming Russian phone calls with Russian messaging apps and social media accounts, plus leaked, closely analyzed, scrutinized and authentic Russian databases. These were genuine calls and they took months, so that's all we heard about. It is now March when they were recorded, we are finding out today, it took a lot of reporting and a lot of research work to get it right, thank you for telling us this. Douglas Herbert for us.