Russian soldier's 'final messages' to mother moments before death read out at UN General Assembly

Ukraine's UN ambassador has shared what he says are the last messages a Russian soldier sent to his mother shortly before he was killed in Ukraine.

Speaking at a rare emergency session of the UN General Assembly on Monday, Sergiy Kyslytsya read out a text conversation that suggest the soldier was unprepared for resistance in Ukraine.

Holding up printed images of the texts, Kyslytsya read aloud what he said was sent between the soldier, called Alyosha, and his mother, shortly before the man died.

"Alyosha, how are you doing? Why has it been so long since you responded? Are you really in training exercises?" the soldier's mother wrote.

The soldier replied: "Mama, I'm no longer in Crimea. I'm not in training sessions."

"Where are you then? Papa is asking whether I can send you a parcel."

"What kind of parcel mama, can you send me?"

"What are you talking about, what happened?"

"Mama, I'm in Ukraine. There is a real war raging here. I'm afraid. 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 armoured vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass. They call us fascists. Mama, this is so hard."

Kyslytsya went on: "In several moments, he was killed.

"If you want to just visualise the magnitude of the tragedy, you have to imagine next to you, next to every nameplate of every single country in the General Assembly, more than 30 souls of killed Russian soldiers already.

"Next to every name of every single country in this assembly, 30-plus killed Russian soldiers.

"Hundreds of killed Ukrainians, dozens of killed children, and it goes on and on and on."

Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, rejected the messages as "fake".

"Russian actions have been distorted and thwarted," he said. "The number of incredible fakes is staggering, with the media outlets and social networks proliferating.

"Social networks have training manuals about how to create fakes to taint our military operation.

"Throughout Ukrainian social networks, there are 1.2 million such pieces of fake news and the correspondence that was read out by the Ukrainian ambassador is also part of these."