They were told Ukrainians were imprisoned by mythic Nazis,” he added. They are very uncomfortable because it’s not what they expected. “They shout expletives in front of armed people. Instead, Ukrainian civilians had stood in front of enemy tanks, blocked armoured columns with their bare hands and had sung the national anthem in front of twitchy Russian guards. Kovzhun said the Russian general staff had thought the invasion would be “easy peasy”, and a repeat of the operations to seize Crimea in 2014, or their recent deployment to Kazakhstan, which were largely unopposed. And there are career guys who have fought in Syria and the Donbas.” Photograph: Baz Ratner/ReutersĪlex Kovzhun, a one-time adviser to Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said Russian soldiers could be divided into two sorts: “There are the young conscripts who are scared shitless. ![]() This figure may be an exaggeration, but on Wednesday, however, even the Kremlin admitted 498 of its servicemen had died, with 1,591 wounded.Īrmed servicemen wait in Russian army vehicles outside a Ukranian border guard post in the Crimean town of Balaclava, 1 March 2014. Ukraine claims to have killed several thousand Russian troops. They are doomed,” he said, telling enemy soldiers to “go home”. In a video address on Thursday Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pressed home the same message: that Putin has sent his invading forces into Ukraine without an understandable mission. “They called my uncle Batya (Dad) and chatted with him about pigeon breeding, his hobby. ![]() “My uncle said to them: ‘Where the fuck do you see Banderivtsi?’ My aunt told them to get off her flowerbeds,” Mazhulin recounted. The soldiers explained they were looking for Banderivtsi, or followers of the second world war Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. Mazhulin said his uncle and aunt, Viktor and Valentina, had talked with Russian soldiers when they rolled past their house in Kupiansk, in north-east Ukraine, close to the border. They try and make Russia believe Ukraine is not a real country and say fascist monsters have captured it.” He added: “Since 2014 the Russian government has been brainwashing its population with propaganda. We are talking about 19-year-old and 20-year-old boys.” “A lot are conscripts born in 2002 or 2003. They didn’t anticipate resistance,” Artem Mazhulin, a 31-year-old English teacher from Kharkiv said. “Some of them thought they were on military exercises. Russian forces were expecting flowers and cheers, not bullets and bombs, they said.Ġ3:50 Moments of defiance: how Ukraine has stood up to Russia – video Several prisoners of war said they had been assured Ukrainians would welcome them as liberators. The Kremlin also appears to have had a totally fantastical idea of the reception they would get. Soldiers were given food and fuel supplies for only two or three days, the videos suggest. ![]() ![]() The assumption in Moscow was that the operation would be swift and successful. These episodes do not mean that the Kremlin will fail in its attempts to conquer Ukraine, as its tactics shift to brutal shelling of civilians.īut low morale among invading troops might be one reason why Russia’s blitzkrieg plan to overwhelm Ukraine appears not to have progressed at the speed Putin would have wanted. Others have abandoned their vehicles and have set off back towards the Russian border on foot, lugging their weapons and kitbags, videos suggest. Eight days after Vladimir Putin’s invasion it is clear that a significant number of his servicemen are demoralised and reluctant to fight. Another phrase frequently used is oni obmanuli nas: they duped us. And yet there are numerous similar interviews with Russian captives which have been circulating on Ukrainian social media channels, expressing similar sentiments.Īsked what he would tell his commanders, one said bluntly: “They are faggots”. The three-minute video was filmed under conditions of duress.
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