“And then I said to myself that I couldn’t take part anymore.” Pavel Filátiev, a Russian soldier who took part in the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and later repented, chains on cigarettes in the garden of a charming hotel in central Paris. The 34-year-old ex-skydiver talks about the confusion he lived in at the time and the doubts that built up in his head. And he remembers the moment when he said enough is enough: “The hardest thing, psychologically, was realizing that this war was useless, the decision was as stupid as possible, it was catastrophic for Ukraine and it was no good wouldn’t bring Russia either.”
He doesn’t like being called a deserter. He left the army, taking advantage of the fact that he had been evacuated from the combat zone because of an unheroic conjunctivitis: a piece of earth had gotten in his eye during a bombing raid. It was April and he had been at war for two months. Rather than rejoin, he wrote down his experiences, shared them on a Russian social network and website, and fled his country in August with the help of the Russian NGO New Dissidents Foundation. He ended up in France, where he is awaiting recognition as a political refugee. He says he could face 15 years in prison in Russia.
“Like most people in Russia and Ukraine, I didn’t believe in war either,” says Sergeant Filátiev, whose book, Zov, is published in Spanish by Galaxia Gutenberg, with a translation by Andrei Kozinets. Zov means “call” and refers to the letters engraved on his country’s military vehicles. Filátiev, a paratrooper with the 56th Air Assault Brigade, when asked how this will all end, says bluntly: “If Putin dies tomorrow, the war will be over. It is he who gives the impetus for it to continue.”
Zov — translated into French, German, English, and other languages in addition to Spanish — is the first-ever first-person chronicle of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The author is the son of a military man. After going through the army in his youth, leaving and dedicating 10 years to other jobs, he reenlisted after the pandemic. The style of the book is fluid, raw, fast-paced. He doesn’t talk about warfare or denounce crimes: he portrays war as a chaotic, seedy place. More Berlanga than Coppola. Nobody knows what he’s doing there, the material is inadequate and the organization absurd.
“I didn’t know that a war was going to start,” he explained to EL PAÍS in an interview through an interpreter. “And when I found myself in the combat zone, I was a bit lost at first because I didn’t really have any information. When things really started, the rockets were flying and the fighting was real and on a fairly large scale, we saw that it was the real war.” He later adds: “In every war there is chaos and disorder. It’s inevitable. And the belligerents are trying to establish order. The better the state and army are organized, the less chaos there is. But there is always. Given the level of disorder in Russia and in the army, chaos has crossed borders.
In the book, Filátiev describes the interactions with the Ukrainian population: “While we were driving through this village at full speed, apart from the confused uncles forming a circle, I saw several old men approaching the road and greeting us with the sign the cross. I had an ambiguous feeling: it wasn’t clear if they were sending us to the other neighborhood or if they were blessing us.”
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Pavel Filátiev, January 12 in Paris. Levy Yann (Yann Levy)
In the river city of Kherson he witnessed scenes of looting. “Have you ever seen the paintings depicting the sack of Rome by the barbarians? You would be the best example of what was going on in the port. Everyone was exhausted and looking wild. People roamed the buildings in search of food, water, a shower and a bed. Some began taking computers and other valuables they found. I was no exception: I grabbed a hat I found in a damaged caravan because my ski mask wasn’t warm at all. But when I saw electrical appliances being stolen, even I, who was as wild as the others after living outdoors, felt embarrassed.
When asked in an interview whether he had witnessed war crimes, he became serious: “The recurring problem was the lack of coordination. If we saw armed people on the roof of a building, they could give the order to shoot without checking if there were civilians inside. And the same with air strikes. Maybe the realization wasn’t deep enough. I think that could have resulted in civilian deaths. It’s a kind of criminal negligence.” And he points out: “If you want to know if I’ve witnessed summary executions of prisoners of war or civilians, no. I’ve never seen or heard of it in my area.”
Filátiev measures the words. He does not deny that Russia committed crimes in Ukraine – evidence – but he affirms that he never saw them. The book did not convince everyone. It was emphasized that not all details can be verified: the author’s version must be trusted. The New York Times quoted Russian opposition figure Ivan Zhdanov in a September article: “To be honest, I’m skeptical about his decision, why he went there and fought there.”
Another criticism comes from Vladimir Osechkin, founder of Gulagu.net, which published Zov’s original version over the summer, and president of the New Dissidents Foundation, which helped Filatiev escape Russia. “I lost confidence in him,” says Osechkin from Biarritz, where he lives. And he explains his version of a contentious complex with Filátiev, which has reached the French courts. Osechkin says Filátiev signed a deal to transfer the rights to the book to the New Dissidents Foundation and a fund for Ukraine. And he assures that the ex-soldier surprisingly canceled the contract in court because he signed it under pressure. When the book was a text circulating on social networks and websites, there was certainly little at stake; It is now a potential international bestseller.
Osechkin, who is listed in Zov’s acknowledgment, suggests that Filatiev simply wanted to keep the money. And he raises something more serious, without presenting any evidence: the possibility that the ex-soldier’s mother, who lives in Russia, was blackmailed by that country’s intelligence services into breaking with the New Dissidents Foundation. “I sent a letter to his literary agent,” says Osechkin, “telling him to stop selling the book and check the whole story, all the facts.”
Filátiev sees himself as a victim of his former ally. “It’s not really an argument. I see it as an attempt to use me, to cheat me,” he says in an interview. And he questions the reliability of the fund to which he intended to donate the rights to the book. “Now they’re trying to discredit my book and my person,” he concludes. “I don’t know if he read it, but he says what I’m telling is lies and that the book shouldn’t have been published. I trusted him, but I was fooled.”
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