A Russian soldier in an occupied part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region was caught telling his wife back home that Putin’s own troops were the ones who bombed a Russian town on the border this week, according to Ukrainian intelligence. In an audio clip of an intercepted call released Friday by Ukraine’s Security Service, a woman can be heard expressing concern about the attack on the town of Klimovo that Moscow blamed on Ukrainian forces, which reportedly left seven people wounded. “That was ours fucking stuff up,” the purported soldier quickly responds. “It’s necessary. They do that to provoke the [Ukrainians]. And that’s why they hit it,” he said. “We talked to the bosses and they said that’s how it is. The same shit was happening in the Chechen War, they blew up apartments in Moscow, as if it were terrorists. It was really the FSB,” he said, referring to the series of bombings in September 1999 that helped bring Vladimir Putin to power. Prominent Kremlin critics and defectors like Alexander Litvinenko have long accused Russia’s security services of orchestrating the bombings themselves to drum up support for the Chechen War and Putin. The unnamed soldier in the intercepted call goes on to say there was “no way” the Ukrainians could have reached the town of Klimovo, in the Bryansk region, from where they were, and tells his wife he plans to “refuse” to go further with the war in Ukraine.
