He is now living in France, where he has applied for asylum. “I do not know how to convey to millions of zombies with Russian passports that we ourselves are to blame for everything that is happening. He also directs anger at his fellow citizens for idly standing by and contributing to the corruption that he says permeates every aspect of Russian society. His descriptions are detailed, jarring and sometimes poetic, while he seethes with rage when critiquing his government for starting “a terrible war” in a country “where most of our relatives live.” Also, it seemed as if “officers and enlisted were not even working on the same side or on the same objectives.”įilatyev’s story stands as one of the few open-source war accounts from the perspective of a Russian soldier. “His description of military confusion and hurry up and wait,” she said. Wolfe, a medical logistics flight chief at Robins Air Force Base, Ga., was surprised by Filatyev’s frankness. “Apathy, corruption, incompetence, we can grab just about every bad word in the English language for organizational structure and it will fit,” Obolonskiy said. Filatyev was told to jump out of his vehicle, set up his mortars and then move them, and nobody knew why, Obolonskiy said.ĭuring training, they were told to go out and shoot, but not enough weapons were available and there were no bullets, he said. He pointed to examples of military incompetence that sound almost comical. at age 11, said he “failed to grasp the severity” of the corruption. Obolonskiy, who was born in Ukraine and came to the U.S. “It remains the same or maybe even it’s become worse.” In reading “Zov,” it’s clear “that nothing has changed,” he said. He ended up joining the Army at the age of 17 and later switched to the Air Force.īerlin lived through the post-Soviet 1990s in Russia, when “corruption was at an all-time high,” he said. His mother didn’t want him to be drafted. Russian is being spoken much less frequently by Ukraine’s military and citizenry, both as a matter of cultural pride and battlefield strategy, said Berlin, who now is studying Ukrainian.īerlin, 34, was born in Russia and came to the United States at age 15. And there’s an increased demand for Ukrainian speakers. Since the war started, the number of language assistance requests has increased for many of the service’s Russian LEAP scholars, the translators said. “There’s enough (in Russian) to fill a whole semester’s worth.” “Funny enough, we were trying to prepare for the upper classmen a class on Russian swear language,” Berlin said. The word “utyos” also can mean cliff or rocks.Ĭolloquial speech and swear words also colored the manuscript, Berlin said.Ĭursing in Russian is “kind of a sublanguage of its own,” he said, noting that Russian has more than 10,000 swear words and combinations. The NSV Utyos is a Soviet-era heavy machine gun. “I took a second look at ‘rocks.’ Why was he surrounded by rocks?” Nadia Wolfe, who was born in Kyrgyzstan, initially was puzzled when Filatyev described being “surrounded by grenades, ammunition and rocks,” she said. “Starley,” for example, is slang for a senior lieutenant, while “kombat” is short for battalion commander. Obolonskiy, a director of operations for a C-17 maintenance unit at McGuire Air Force Base, N.J., consulted Russian military forums and other sources to research military vocabulary.Ī glossary tacked on to the end of the document lists more than a dozen military terms. “Artificial intelligence is just not there yet to incorporate all the jargon and Russian as a living language,” he said. Roman Obolonskiy, a LEAP airman on the project. The document is being used in Air Force academic circles to examine the conflict from the Russian side and inform students of the conditions on the ground early in the war, they said.Įarlier publications of Filatyev’s account were translated using artificial intelligence, said Maj. The “Zov” translators said the project shows the importance of maintaining diverse language fluency in the force. Part of the Air Force Culture and Language Center, the program currently supports some 4,200 scholars representing 96 languages.
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