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They were lanky and fresh-faced, and the battle they lost had been their first.
Packed into Ukrainian prison cells, dozens of captured Russian conscripts lay on cots or sat on wooden benches, wearing flip-flops and, in one instance, watching cartoons on a television provided by the warden.
In interviews, they recalled abandoning their positions or surrendering as they found themselves facing well-equipped, battle-hardened Ukrainian forces streaming across their border.
“We ran into a birch grove and hid,” said Pvt. Vasily, whose small border fort was overrun on Aug. 6 — at the outset of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia that was the first significant foreign attack on the country since World War II. The New York Times is identifying the prisoners by only their first names and ranks for their safety if they are returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange.
The fighting marked a significant shift in the war, with Ukrainian armored columns rumbling into Russia two and a half years after Russia had launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s border, it turned out, was defended thinly, largely by young conscripted soldiers who in interviews described surrendering or abandoning their positions. Private Vasily said he had survived by lying in the birch forest near the Russian border for three days, covered in branches and leaves, before deciding to surrender.
“I never thought it would happen,” he said of the Ukrainian attack.
The Russian military command had, by all signs, made the same assumption, manning its border defenses with green conscripts, some drafted only months earlier. Their defeat and descriptions of surrendering in large numbers could increase Ukraine’s leverage in possible settlement talks and lead to prisoner exchanges.
