A young Russian soldier gives up and some Ukrainians feed him and make him call home: the video has been circulating on social media since yesterday. A simple but very strong message of peace. They would not be isolated cases “Some Russian departments are sabotaging their means, so as not to participate in this barbaric war”. This was said by Michael Carpenter, American ambassador to the OSCE. If Putin appealed to the Ukrainian military to abandon Zelensky, on the other side “Western leaders have already asked the Russian military to lay down their weapons. The interesting thing is that there are units that are sabotaging their vehicles, so as to not be able to join the fight. I hope this continues. Russian conscripts aged 18, 19, 20 understand that they have no reason to invade Ukraine.

Putin planned to take Ukraine in three days

Various videos of Russian soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces are currently being shot on social media. A young man explained to the cameras that “Putin planned to take Ukraine in three days. The supplies of food he distributed to his soldiers when he sent them to fight” were enough for that period of time. “By order of the highest leadership of the Russian Federation”, moreover, almost all the military “have been deprived of cell phones and documents”.

Many of the captured soldiers are very young. Some claim they thought it was just a drill. Not an invasion. They have scared faces, kid faces. Conscripts were sent to fight without knowing it. It is now known to them and their families that it was never communicated that they would not participate in simple exercises. “They had sent him for exercises in the Belgorod region – says a mother to the TV channel ” Dozhd “ -. He tried not to tell me anything, he knows that I worry. Every now and then he wrote:” Everything is fine. “He did not tell me anything until at the end, then he calls and says: “Mommy, don’t fret, don’t panic. Maybe they’ll send us to Ukraine. Mum don’t cry … I haven’t signed anything, I don’t know what these contracts are”. Then silence.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine: latest news live

Deceived by superiors and sent to die in war

The detailed complaint comes from the Committee of Mothers of Russian Soldiers, an independent NGO born even before the fall of the USSR to investigate the abuses of conscripts in the Soviet military system. During the war in Chechnya, activists provided legal and material aid to the parents of fallen soldiers. Svetlana Golub in the Guardian talks about hundreds of phone calls from family members looking for news of their children. There are some young soldiers who say they were forced by their superiors to sign the document that transforms them from conscripts into contract soldiers, suitable to go to war. Many others have not signed anything.

The Novaya Gazeta, one of the few free voices in Russia, reports another testimony. The mother of a 23-year-old soldier was forced to sign a contract in Bryansk and then sent to military exercises in Belarus. There, on February 23, the blackmail triggered: “The superiors told us that we had entered Belarus illegally, that the contract we had signed concerned Russia.” From this moment on, you have no connection with the Russian army, you are deserters. The next day, the son calls back: “They load us into the tanks. They deceived us.”