'Mama, this is so hard:' Ukraine UN envoy reads out what he claims are the final text messages sent by a slain Russian soldier

• Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine's ambassador to the UN, highlighted the cost of war in a fiery speech on Monday.
• He read out what he claimed were text messages sent between a slain Russian soldier and the man's mother.

Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations condemned Putin in another fiery speech on Monday, reading out text messages he claimed were an exchange between a slain Russian soldier and the man's mother.

While speaking to the UN General Assembly, Sergiy Kyslytsya presented "an actual screenshot" of the messages found on the phone of the dead soldier, noting that the messages had been sent "several moments before" the soldier was killed.

Kyslytsya read out the exchange in Russian, starting with the mother asking her son if he is "really in training exercises."

"Mama, I'm no longer in Crimea. I'm not in training sessions," the soldier replied, per Kyslytsya's speech.

The mother then asks if she can send a parcel to her son and asks "what happened" — to which he replies that she cannot.

"Mama, I'm in Ukraine. There is a real war raging here. I'm afraid," wrote the Russian soldier, per Kyslytsya's speech. "We are bombing all of the cities together, even targeting civilians. We were told that they would welcome us, and they are falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass."

"They call us fascists. Mama, this is so hard," the soldier wrote.

—CSPAN (@cspan) February 28, 2022

Kyslytsya then asked the assembly to visualize the "magnitude" of the crisis in Ukraine.

In the same speech, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN also condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin for suggesting that the use of nuclear weapons should be on the table, calling it "madness."

"If he wants to kill himself, he doesn't need to use nuclear arsenal. He has to do what the guy in Berlin did in a bunker in May 1945," Kyslytsya said, appearing to compare Putin to Adolf Hitler, the German dictator and Nazi Party leader who committed suicide in a Berlin bunker towards the end of World War II.

Kyslytsya has delivered several statements in the UN excoriating Putin for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. On February 23, the ambassador slammed Russia for its military attack on Ukraine, telling the Russian ambassador to the UN: "There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell."

Insider's live blog of the invasion is covering developments as they happen.