The international delegation, headed by Ana Lucía Bueno, ICRC Public Health Coordinator, and Sujit Panda, Head of the Physical Rehabilitation…
In the Pokrovsk direction, soldiers of the 3rd Operational Brigade Spartan captured three Russian servicemen. All of them have criminal pasts, broken biographies, and contracts signed not for service, but to escape their own lives.
This was reported on the page of the 3rd Operational Brigade Spartan named after Colonel Petro Bolbochan of the National Guard of Ukraine.
Criminal recruitment instead of an army
Among the prisoners is 33-year-old Russian Kostya, who signed a contract to quickly “close” his third conviction. According to him, he has two sons — both had served prison sentences and both ended up at war.
Another prisoner is 33-year-old Yura from Uzbekistan. He came to a police station in Russia himself and asked to be enlisted. He explained that after a divorce, he wanted to “end his life” in the war, but became frightened at the front and changed his mind.
The third is 44-year-old Belarusian Denis, the son of a Ukrainian woman. He served a sentence for murder, was later detained for drug distribution, after which he signed a contract with the Russian army.
Cannon fodder as a military model
In on-camera conversations, the prisoners spoke about how personnel are recruited in Russia, about food shortages, command indifference, and the real scale of losses. According to them, the fields of Donetsk region are strewn with the bodies of Russian soldiers sent into battle without training or supplies.
The Spartan Brigade emphasizes that these prisoners are a telling cross-section of who the Russian army relies on today — people from prisons, without motivation, without resources, and without value to their own state.
