24-05-2022, 10:58 AM
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Occupant: Russian Officer home video shows Putin destroying Russian people quiet life
24-05-2022, 11:01 AM
The extraordinary video starts several months before the war with film of Shalaev’s family celebration, singing along to patriotic pop songs and drinking whisky with an uncle who ends up urinating on himself and struggling to clamber on to a bed.
In one scene filmed at a party, smartly dressed young people belt out a popular song called Officers that contains lines such as ‘Officers, officers, your heart is at the gunpoint, for Russia and freedom to the end’.
The reality proved rather different after Shalaev – who is from a small town near the Arctic Circle – was taken to Crimea, bussed into southern Ukraine and then brought to the Donbas frontline.
Twelve days into the war, the young Russian officer filmed himself searching for weapons at what appears to be a captured Ukrainian position.
‘B****, will at least one gun be here?’ he asks, attempting to open a safe marked ‘Combat control documents’ and filming an empty arsenal. ‘Damn, did they really keep the f****** defence here or did we shoot this place for nothing?’
Then he swears again and laughs bitterly. A few days later he films two men with injured hands inside his vehicle and then starts talking about taking ‘the dead guy’ from an engineering battalion, describing him as ‘ground meat – just mince’.
He also highlights the military uncertainty amid their bungled invasion. ‘They began building the bridges and they got bombed. Now they don’t know what to do. Regroup? Don’t regroup?’
As the days pass, Shalaev admits on several occasions to losing track of time and then looks pleased as he boasts on March 29 that ‘yesterday I took a bath’.
In the following frames, he tells a baffled colleague that ‘I am making a video’ as he films through a slotted window while they trundle along, before they drive past destroyed military vehicles beside a wooded area.
‘They blew up the APC,’ he exclaims. ‘F***. Here as well. Are they ours or theirs?’
Then he swears again in panic. ‘Gotta get the hell out of here, they’ll blow us up as well. We’ve been under attack for three hours now. They are f****** us up.’ There is thick black smoke ahead as he orders colleagues to ‘shoot them’. But there is only the scrunching sound of a jammed gun, prompting more swearing.
Next, Shalaev is in another village saying ‘our vehicle exploded’. He later told Ukrainian captors that his APC was hit by a mortar or grenade, leading him to flee into hiding with two wounded colleagues in a Donbas basement.
He seems relieved to see a Russian vehicle ahead, but there is smoke billowing from it as he films small bits of a human body on the muddy ground. ‘Someone’s flesh. Someone blew up. Scraps of meat. Here it is. We were in it. F*** me, it’s done,’ he says.
The final scenes, blurred as if shot while zooming in from a hiding place, show Ukrainian soldiers walking along as one drops to his knees. ‘I can’t figure out what the hell he is doing,’ whispers Shalaev. ‘Is he putting a mine there?’
The 24-minute documentary called The Occupant was put together by Ukrayinska Pravda, an online news outlet.
In one scene filmed at a party, smartly dressed young people belt out a popular song called Officers that contains lines such as ‘Officers, officers, your heart is at the gunpoint, for Russia and freedom to the end’.
The reality proved rather different after Shalaev – who is from a small town near the Arctic Circle – was taken to Crimea, bussed into southern Ukraine and then brought to the Donbas frontline.
Twelve days into the war, the young Russian officer filmed himself searching for weapons at what appears to be a captured Ukrainian position.
‘B****, will at least one gun be here?’ he asks, attempting to open a safe marked ‘Combat control documents’ and filming an empty arsenal. ‘Damn, did they really keep the f****** defence here or did we shoot this place for nothing?’
Then he swears again and laughs bitterly. A few days later he films two men with injured hands inside his vehicle and then starts talking about taking ‘the dead guy’ from an engineering battalion, describing him as ‘ground meat – just mince’.
He also highlights the military uncertainty amid their bungled invasion. ‘They began building the bridges and they got bombed. Now they don’t know what to do. Regroup? Don’t regroup?’
As the days pass, Shalaev admits on several occasions to losing track of time and then looks pleased as he boasts on March 29 that ‘yesterday I took a bath’.
In the following frames, he tells a baffled colleague that ‘I am making a video’ as he films through a slotted window while they trundle along, before they drive past destroyed military vehicles beside a wooded area.
‘They blew up the APC,’ he exclaims. ‘F***. Here as well. Are they ours or theirs?’
Then he swears again in panic. ‘Gotta get the hell out of here, they’ll blow us up as well. We’ve been under attack for three hours now. They are f****** us up.’ There is thick black smoke ahead as he orders colleagues to ‘shoot them’. But there is only the scrunching sound of a jammed gun, prompting more swearing.
Next, Shalaev is in another village saying ‘our vehicle exploded’. He later told Ukrainian captors that his APC was hit by a mortar or grenade, leading him to flee into hiding with two wounded colleagues in a Donbas basement.
He seems relieved to see a Russian vehicle ahead, but there is smoke billowing from it as he films small bits of a human body on the muddy ground. ‘Someone’s flesh. Someone blew up. Scraps of meat. Here it is. We were in it. F*** me, it’s done,’ he says.
The final scenes, blurred as if shot while zooming in from a hiding place, show Ukrainian soldiers walking along as one drops to his knees. ‘I can’t figure out what the hell he is doing,’ whispers Shalaev. ‘Is he putting a mine there?’
The 24-minute documentary called The Occupant was put together by Ukrayinska Pravda, an online news outlet.
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