A Russian commander has been recorded screaming at his soldiers to "take out" all civilians in a Ukrainian village near Mariupol.
A leaked radio dispatch intercepted by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) captured the sound of an unidentified Russian troop detailing the positions of nearby non-combatants.
His commander, who has also not been named, can then be heard ordering his subordinates to "take them all f***ing out".
The soldier then clarifies that two people seen emerging from a grove are dressed in "civilian clothes" - but the information does nothing to change the commander's orders.
"Off them all, f***!" he can be heard shouting.
Morale among Russian soldiers appears to be low in the leaked recording, with one soldier complaining they're hopelessly outnumbered by the Ukrainians.
"Their group has 150,000 soldiers and there's f***ing 3,000 of us... They are on the left, right, encircling us, f***!" he can be heard saying.
"There's so many of them and few of us. We don't have any support, no aviation, not a f***ing thing!'"
Ukraine says it has been able to listen in on a lot of Russian communications because their military still relies on relatively unsophisticated technology or even walkie-talkies.
The horrifying audio sheds new light on the merciless violence that has been inflicted on the Ukrainian people since Russia invaded on February 24.
Mariupol, a port city located in the southeast between Crimea and the Donbas region, has been one of the central targets of Russian aggression with up to 90% of the city's infrastructure believed to have been destroyed in airstrikes in recent weeks.
It had a population of about 400,000 before the war, and around 300,000 remain trapped in the city now under siege, although other estimates put this figure at somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000.
Up to 5,000 people are thought to have been killed in Mariupol since the shelling began, with many deaths attributed to starvation after the city's water and electricity was cut off.
On March 20 Russian forces brutally bombed an art school that was sheltering 400 women, children and elderly people, ignoring the word "children" that had been desperately scrawled on the ground outside.
One local woman said the corpses of the dead are having to be buried in sandpits in the city's kindergartens because it is softer and easier to dig quickly between airstrikes.
"I saw so many bodies, no one was able to pick all of them up," she told the Independent after escaping to the city of Zaporizhzhia, 200km north of Mariupol.
"People are burying them in the sand pits on top of each other."
Ukraine security officials claim Russia is preparing a "false flag" attack on Mariupol, which they will allegedly use to blame Ukrainian soldiers of committing against their own people.
"The main task of Russian propaganda today is to divert the attention of the audience, both international and domestic, as much as possible," the SBU has said.
"According to existing data, the occupiers are preparing a large-scale falsification: They plan to collect the bodies of Mariupol residents killed by the Russians themselves, and present them as mass victims of the Ukrainian troops.
"For this reason, there have been false theses recently that Ukrainians use peaceful residents as human shields."
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said of the attacks on Mariupol: "To do this to a peaceful city... is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come."
