© Stepan Petrenko/TASS

The Russian Defense Ministry’s information resources have published lots of testimony and video interviews of captured AFU soldiers. The latter appear to have been thrown into battle without proper training, with those willing to quit shot by the Ukrainian National Guard, the SOBR special police and their own commanders.

So, Alexey Kuprienko said he got a summons at a grocery and tried to escape, but they caught him and ascribed to an assault brigade that was flung into battle off-the-cuff. "The commander didn't care and treated us like cannon fodder. In case of danger, he ran away and stood behind three kilometers away," Kuprienko said. He was the only survivor out of the six people who were with him in the position: "We suffer huge losses. Ordinary soldiers are not allowed to leave the battlefield. Everything is covered in blood and corpses. There have been desertion cases, but the National Guard and the SOBR are constantly there behind our backs, ordered to shoot to kill. Company officers are also known to have engaged in this — they shoot at their subordinates."

Another conscript Kirill Vetrov advised his fellow soldiers in the trenches to follow his path and surrender: "You don’t better fight this war, it's stupid and useless. What is happening in Ukraine is a meat grinder. I’ve lost many friends and they keep dying."

Sergeant Viktor Kostenko said he was taken to the front line directly from the factory. He did not want to serve and surrendered at the earliest possible juncture: "I was out on a task with my squad to dig trenches and we saw the Russian military when we got to the place, and immediately surrendered. They treated us well." Those mobilized have no chance to leave their units, Viktor pointed out: "You will not leave even with your leg lost."

Prisoners from around Krasny Liman told us about their military training in Germany and Slovenia. NATO instructors and psychologists made long hours with Ukrainian servicemen, teaching them to kill Russians. "Kill as many Russians as possible so that there are fewer of them left, and they will all flee Ukraine," the surrendered Ukrainian soldiers said. Counsellors also turned out to have instilled hatred towards Russia and urged to make no bones about violating international humanitarian rules of warfare. The rest of the training, the prisoners say, left much to be desired. In the very first battles these NATO-trained personnel surrendered to survive. Captured fighter Andrey Tlustyak reported grave training issues in Lithuania. The number of Ukrainian fighters loathing to fight and seeking surrender is on the rise. But due to severe losses, not everyone manages to, Tlustyak said. "It's so bad there, people are being shot. I call on all the Ukrainians in the battlefield to leave, the faster the better," he concluded.

Captured Yevgeny Golodnov said he also no longer wanted to engage in hostilities against Russia: "I don't want to go back to this hell." Ukrainian commanders ordered him and his comrade to dig a shelter for themselves and have a rest until they wake them up when it was proper time. But they left without a word, and those to wake Golodnov up were the Russian military already. AFU fighters captured in the battles for Kleshcheyevka reported the inhuman attitude of the Ukrainian command to ordinary soldiers and their terrible deaths, as well as defied evacuation requests coming from the wounded. They wait in vain for salvation, dying in basements or on the battlefield. A soldier said army commanders did nothing about that: "Our guys die of open wounds, their bodies covered with flies. We don't know why this war is needed, and what they want from us. No shells are being delivered, we are running out of ammunition, the wounded are not even being evacuated."

In the Zaporozhye direction, with its fiercest battles and the stifling Ukrainian counteroffensive, more and more personnel get in touch with Russian fighters to ask them for a ceasefire and a chance to leave. They beg to cover from the nationalists who shoot those surrendering in their backs, and our cover groups are sent for help. A case to this effect took place in Maryinka on the western outskirts of Donetsk, which has turned into another fighting epicenter. Our soldiers said that several Ukrainians radioed them to arrange for surrender. But when starting to leave positions, the Ukrainians were shot by their fellow troops — they drove up in jeeps and fired pointblank.

"We are trapped, we have 5 wounded, two of them seriously, you cover us with artillery, but we don't want to fight, we surrender, over...", a group of the 128 brigade AFU militants contacted the Russian military via a humanitarian radio frequency to surrender and save their lives. Recently, a tank company commander with the 239th Russian Army regiment entitled "Yermak" captured 18 armed Ukrainians at once while on a task next to Lisichansk. A whole platoon of Ukrainian infantrymen was captured by a single tankman and four recruits of the Bars battalion. In total, over 8,000 Ukrainian military have been held captive since the beginning of Russia’s special military operation, with their number constantly growing.

Serious losses are testified to not by prisoner stories alone. According to Ukraine’s Internal Ministry, more than 27,000 people are missing in hostilities, with their fate unknown. Also, the AFU sets limits on the removal of those killed from the front in order to avoid "panic sentiment", and Ukrainian commanders deliberately conceal real losses and continue to get food and supplies for "deadheads".

78% of Ukrainians have close relatives or friends who were killed or wounded in this war, as revealed by a Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) survey. The highest death toll is fixed in the west of Ukraine — 69% (center 65%, south 58%, east 52%).

The cellphones of those killed and captured show correspondence with relatives and friends, full of wallow. They write about "the hell in Zaporozhye", urge their near and dear to flee the country, complain about losing the war, and those sorts of things. The morale of the Armed Forces and society begins to fall. Prior to the much-hyped counteroffensive, Ukrainians wrote a lot about the victory locked and loaded in social media. There pinned many hopes and expectations on it, dreaming about their troops enter Crimea and raise flags in Donetsk, Berdyansk, Mariupol... They boasted that NATO, the United States and Europe were all for them, and the Leopards, Abrams and other weapons of the West would crush the Russian army. Now the comments and chats are only full of apathy and frustration.

Surrendered enemy soldier Vyacheslav Protsenko said Ukrainian soldiers lacked motivation whatsoever. "We are not going to win this war," he concluded.