He was injured and sent back to Russia for recuperation, during which time (45 days) he wrote his memoir, called "ZOV 56" after the tactical symbol displayed on Russian vehicles during the invasion.
[5] Filatyev served as a paratrooper in the 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment, which before the February 2022 invasion was based in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that was unilaterally annexed by the Russian Federation in 2014.
[3] In late February 2022, his unit was tasked to storm into mainland Ukraine, under conditions which Filatyev described as being 'exhausted and poorly equipped', and 'with little in terms of concrete logistics or objectives, and no idea why the war was taking place at all.
[6] Without clear information as to what was going on, Filatyev hypothesised that his unit was either being sent to reinforce Russian-occupied territory in Donbas, or to defend against a Ukrainian or NATO attack on Crimea; he claims it wasn't until his group was tasked to destroy a bridge across the river Dnieper that he realised Russia was the aggressor.
[6] According to Filatyev, the extreme conditions the military command had put the soldiers in his regiment in, including sleep deprivation, malnutrition and poor sanitation, led them to seize food and valuables from Ukrainian civilians as soon as the Russian army occupied the city of Kherson.
[7] He said he did not seek to justify his fellow soldiers' looting of valuables such as computers, but that he understood that such an item was worth more than a paratrooper's monthly salary, which he was waging his life for every day, criticising this as one of many ways in which the Russian Army "degraded" its servicemen.
"[7] In an office building, Filatyev joined several Russian soldiers in drinking cold champagne and watching the news on a television: "The channel was in Ukrainian, I didn't understand half of it.
All I understood there was that Russian troops were advancing from all directions, Odesa, Kharkiv, Kyiv were occupied, they began to show footage of broken buildings and injured women and children.
[8] Filatyev described harsh conditions, without proper food, sleep, or medical supplies, so that soldiers with various illnesses and wounds went untreated, while the shelling strained their mental health.
[3][4][8] Furthermore, Filatyev wrote that he had witnessed clueless and terrified commanders, old and rusty equipment (the rifle he was given was rusted and malfunctioned after a few shots[6]), friendly fire incidents and wavering morale as the campaign stalled.
"[1] Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer wrote: "The Guardian has not been able to independently verify all the details of Filatyev's story, but he has supplied documents and photographs showing he was a paratrooper with the 56th airborne regiment stationed in Crimea, that he was hospitalised with an eye injury sustained while "performing special tasks in Ukraine" in April and that he had written directly to the Kremlin with his complaints about the war before going public.
"[3] The Los Angeles Times said: "While Filatyev's day-to-day anecdotes and descriptions of particular scenes could not be independently verified, his service record in the 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment — which took part in the capture of Kherson and then was stationed on the battlefront outside the nearby city of Mykolaiv — was confirmed by news organizations including the Russian investigative consortium iStories, now based in Riga, Latvia, which published abridged excerpts.
But Filatyev provided his military ID as proof that he served in the 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment based in Crimea, as well as documents showing that he was treated for an eye injury after his return from the front.