Ukraine parades captured Russian soldiers in online videos as Moscow finally starts to admit suffering losses and pictures show bodies of Kremlin fighters

Several of the videos were posted on a Telegram channel set up on Saturday by Ukraine’s Interior Ministry called ‘Find Your Own’. 

Many Russian troops claimed that they believed they were conducting training exercises in the border regions and did not know they were being sent to invade Ukraine. 

Meanwhile Russia’s defence ministry has for the first time acknowledged suffering losses in the conflict after several bodies of the Kremlin’s servicemen emerged. 

Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov gave no figures on Russia’s dead and wounded but said Sunday his country’s losses were ‘many times’ lower than Ukraine’s. 

Meanwhile Ukraine’s defence ministry put the total number of Russian casualties at 5,300, though that number could not be independently verified and the number of casualties from Europe’s largest land conflict since World War II remained unclear amid the confusion. 

One of the videos, which was published on Telegram early on Sunday, shows a captured Russian soldier who identifies himself as Leonid Paktishev, 28, the commander of a sniper unit based in the Rostov region. 

Paktishev’s family, speaking to the Guardian, said they were not aware he had been sent to the frontline with Ukraine – adding they believed their relative did not know prior to his deployment either.  

‘I knew Leonid was in the military, but I had no idea that he was sent to Ukraine. I don’t think he would have been aware of it either,’ his sister Polivtseva, who went by her maiden name, said.  

The family expressed shock and anger that Paktishev had been sent over the border, but stopped short of condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Polivtseva saying she was not ‘competent’ to judge whether the military action was right.

Other footage purported to show Russian soldiers calling their families to tell them they had been captured but were safe and being ‘treated fairly’ by Ukrainian forces. 

In one video the soldier, wearing military fatigues and a black hat, can be heard telling his mother that commanders had told troops they were ‘going as peacekeepers to the territory of the (self-proclaimed) Donetsk People’s Republic.’

‘In fact, a war has broken out and we are here bombing cities,’ he says, before telling his mother not to panic.  

Another video posted on the Ukrainian Security Service’s Facebook page shows a 21-year-old soldier from the snipers telling his captors he was part of military exercises along the border before the invasion. 

‘About two weeks later we were told to line up on the border, and then suddenly we crossed it in the night. There was no choice. If we had refused to go to war we would have been accused of treason.’

Footage appeared on Facebook posted by the Ukrainian military that showed a captured Russian soldier saying he did not come to the country ‘wanting to kill’.   

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk