A Russian policeman found out what was going on in Ukraine and talked about it: he now faces up to 10 years in prison

“Get this information to people,” he asked his friend, not knowing that they were already listening to him. His phone had been tapped by the Russian authorities and seconds before he was heard saying forbidden words about the invasion of Ukraine: “We think we are fighting fascism, but there is no fascism. There isn't.”

Sergei Klokov, who worked for nearly two decades for the Moscow police, now faces up to 10 years in jail in view of a new law punishing the dissemination of information that contradicts the official line of the Kremlin.

A few days after that conversation he had with a former colleague, Klokov was arrested and locked up in the same building where he worked. He would even be being guarded by his wife, security guard, were it because he is on maternity leave.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed the case files, which have call records and transcripts of the interrogations of Klokov and his contacts. As he rebuilt the newspaper, he is a person who considered himself “proudly Russian and who served the state for almost two decades until the war caused him to question his identity.”

In his calls, the agent denounced that Russia was evacuating injured troops to Belarus and hiding the true death toll among soldiers; that Ukraine was not led by Nazis; and that Russian soldiers were killing Ukrainian civilians.

Klokov's story is closely related to Ukraine and shows the close ties of both nations. His father, Valentin Klokov, was born there, into a Russian family, and served as an officer in the Soviet army.

When the conflict broke out, Valentin was in a city east of Kiev, spending the nights in the basement. “The fighting I saw was worse than those in Afghanistan,” he described, comparing with the four years he spent in that country decades ago.

I send the photos to your son of the Russian armored vehicles and the destroyed tanks.

Concerned, Klokov contacted Kiev police officers to see how he could help his father and other acquaintances who were in Russian-controlled areas. In those contacts, he became increasingly aware of what was happening on the ground and what the Russian media never reported.

He also began frequenting Telegram and YouTube channels that escaped Kremlin censorship. Devastated by news and images, he told his friends: “They have destroyed my city. They killed children. Maternity wards”.

He tried to convince his environment to use Telegram, but practically no one listened to him. According to the archives accessed by the Journal, the concern was about food inflation. Klokov didn't get off topic and replied: “We shouldn't have bombed Kiev.”

One of Klokov's colleagues explained in the interrogations: “He said that we had no right to attack and go to war with them, and although I tried to explain to him that there is no war, he didn't listen to me. I can't explain why it became so radical.” Another source added: “He told me that our country is aggressor and fascist. I tried to make him see reason... But he didn't listen to me.”

Faced with these testimonies (or accusations, in the eyes of the new Russian law), a Moscow court approved a request by investigators to place Klokov in custody, stating that he poses a “high degree of danger to the public”.

After the interrogations, the policeman said that he had been mistaken in talking about the military operation and that he could have been misled by the information he received. “I made a mistake while I was in an emotional and anxious state,” he confessed.

However, he resigned from his appointed public defender, Vladimir Makarov, who said that his former client “had lost his mind” because of “all the information that had been supplied to him from Ukraine”.

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