Filenews 4 March 2022
Five Russian soldiers sit in a stone building. They are blindfolded. They are the latest prisoners of the Ukrainians. A voice interrogates them. "Speak up," he tells their leader. He asks him to send a message to the Russians in their home country.
"To be honest, we were fooled," he replies, referring to his superiors in Moscow. "What they told us was a lie. I would tell my own people to leave the territories of Ukraine. We have families and children. I think 90% of us would agree to go home."
The three-minute video was shot under incredible pressure. It is obvious that the soldiers are terrified. The Guardian, however, points out that many more interviews of Russian prisoners circulating on Ukrainian social networks show them expressing similar sentiments. Of course, it is not excluded that these are also scenarios that are "fed" by the Ukrainian army, which is conducting its own information war.
The Russians do not want to fight
However, the British newspaper claims that a significant number of invading troops have lost their morale and do not want war. Some have surrendered, while others have abandoned their vehicles and returned on foot to the Russian border, leaving behind weapons and equipment, according to video. These incidents are not enough for the Kremlin to lose the war, since it has already turned to the constant bombing of populated areas.
The Illusions of the Kremlin
But the low morale of its soldiers may be one of the reasons why Russia did not achieve the lightning war plan that Putin seems to have wanted. According to video, the soldiers who sent to Ukraine were given enough food for only two to three days.
The Kremlin seems to have believed – or rather promoted – a completely wrong view of the conditions that Russians would encounter when crossing the border. Several prisoners of war said they had been assured that the Ukrainians would welcome them as liberators. Russian forces were expecting flowers and accolades, not bullets and bombs, they said.
"Some of them thought it was a military exercise. They didn't expect to meet resistance," explains Artem Mazulin, a 31-year-old English teacher from Kharkiv. "Many were born in 2002 or 2003. We're talking about 19-year-olds and 20-year-old boys."
He added speaking to the Guardian: "Since 2014, the Russian government has been brainwashing its population with propaganda. They are trying to make the Russians believe that Ukraine is not a real country and they say it has been seized by fascist monsters."
"They are doomed"
Mazulin says his uncle and aunt, Viktor and Valentina, had spoken to Russian soldiers when they passed through their home in Kupiansk, in northeastern Ukraine, near the border. The soldiers told them that they are looking for Baderists, that is, followers of Stepan Badera, the Ukrainian fanatical nationalist leader, who during World War II collaborated with the Nazis.
"My uncle said to them, 'Where's the f*** do you see the Baderas?' My aunt told them not to step on her flower beds," she recalls. "They called my uncle 'dad' and chatted about his hobby, pigeon breeding. Then they took their tank and left."
In a taped address on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stood on the same message: that Putin sent his invasion forces to Ukraine without an understandable mission. "They have lost their morale. They are doomed," he said, urging enemy soldiers "to go home."
Young people and careerists
Ukraine claims that thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed during the war. The Kremlin, for its part, announced 498 dead and 1,591 wounded Russians.
Alex Komzoun, who has been an adviser to Ukraine's former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, told the Guardian that Russian soldiers can be divided into two categories: "There are the young people who have been in fear. And then there are the careerists, who have fought in Syria and Donbass."
Convzun observed that Russia's general staff believed the invasion would be a breeze — a repeat of the operations that preceded the annexation of Crimea in 2014 or the recent intervention in Kazakhstan, where they virtually met no resistance. Instead, Ukrainians have appeared determined to wrestle with what they have.
"They shout insults at the gunmen. I have seen the faces of the Russians. They feel uncomfortable because they didn't expect that. They were told that Ukrainians are imprisoned by mythical Nazis," he stressed.
Numbers and propaganda
Nick Reynolds, an onshore warfare and security research analyst at the think tank Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), argues that the death tolls published by Ukrainians are more likely to correspond to reality, while adding that the videos circulating show that the numbers released by Moscow have long since been surpassed.
However, he added, we do not know how the Ukrainian authorities came up with this whole. The thousands of dead they have announced, on their own, give rise to suspicions of exaggeration.
There is no doubt, too, that Ukraine is using the statements of the prisoners to make propaganda. In several videos, young men call their mothers to Russia, who have no idea that their sons are fighting in Ukraine. Usually mothers break out in tears. The Ukrainian authorities, in yet another battle of the information war, created a line of communication for worried Russian relatives.
