A Russian soldier says Putin's troops have been blowing up their own 'as if they were terrorists'

• Ukrainian intel says it intercepted a call between a Russian soldier and his wife.

• In the call, the man can be heard telling his wife that Russian forces blew up Klimovo in Russia.

• Town authorities initially placed the blame on Ukraine, a claim that Kyiv has denied.

Ukrainian intelligence officials claim to have intercepted a call in which a Russian soldier says Vladimir Putin's troops are shooting their own people in Moscow.

The Security Service of Ukraine released an audio clip of the call on Friday, in which a man's voice can be heard saying Putin's forces have been opening fire on a Russian town. The man, a soldier located in Ukraine's Donetsk region, was speaking to his wife on the phone, who's back home in Russia.

"These are our heroes," he told his wife.

"This is done in order to provoke ... Ukrainians," he said, according to Ukrainian intel.

Related video: Why Russia's military is failing so far in Ukraine

The soldier said Russian forces bombed Klimovo, a Russian city straddling the border between Russia and Ukraine. Klimovo authorities, meanwhile, blamed Ukrainian soldiers for shelling the city, an accusation Kyiv has vehemently denied. The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine characterized the blame as "an attempt to ignite anti-Ukraine hysteria in Russia," according to Radio Free Europe, a US-funded media company.

The Russian soldier compared the shelling to the series of bombings in Russian apartments in 1999.

"The same crap was in the Chechen war," he told his wife. "Apartments were blown up in Moscow, like ... they were terrorists."

He said it was orchestrated and carried out by officers with Russia's Federal Security Service, which has frequently been accused of torture.

The Russian invasion, which began on February 24, has forced millions of Ukrainians to flee their homeland. So far, more than 4.8 million Ukrainians have escaped since the beginning of the invasion, according to data from the United Nations Refugee Agency. In the first week alone, more than 1 million Ukrainians left.

Ukrainians who spoke to Insider over the course of the ongoing invasion have painted a grim picture of the devastation. They've described hearing missiles fire through the sky in the dead of night, having to share a single bulletproof vest as Russian soldiers tear through their towns, and troops shooting at homes and hospitals.

Ukrainian intelligence said in a Facebook post that the call between the soldier and wife makes it "obvious that the Kremlin is indifferent not only to its military, but also to civilian Russians, who also suffered from the shelling of Russian troops."

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