Videos show: Ukraine captures dozens of Russian soldiers during Kursk offensive

“It's been a long time since I've seen a video of Russian soldiers surrendering en masse like this,” said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “When I saw these videos, I got the feeling that these soldiers were not battle-hardened soldiers who fought in Ukraine.”

The images showed the arrest of prisoners in locations stretching over an area of ​​more than 22.5 kilometers on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine.

New videos and photos are being posted online all the time. The Post did not count prisoners seen in images it could not independently verify, meaning the actual number of Russian prisoners taken during the offensive is much higher.

In seven videos, prisoners identify themselves as conscripts, men between the ages of 18 and 30 who are doing their compulsory military service for a year. Conscript soldiers receive no pay and are poorly trained. Putin has promised not to send them into combat, although Russian law allows it, as long as they have completed four months of basic training.

“The use of conscripts in combat undermines the social contract between Russian families and the government that has existed under Putin's leadership since 1999,” Massicot said.

Several videos taken less than a kilometer inland in Russia, in the village of Sverdlikovo, show at least 29 captured Russian soldiers. Flanked by armed Ukrainian soldiers and with their arms raised above their heads, they march north with a drone along a small road lined on one side by trees and residential buildings.

In other videos, they lie face down on the same street or kneel with their hands behind their backs. A Ukrainian soldier films the captured soldiers as they call out their names and military units to the camera.

Near the Sudzha border crossing, several videos show the capture of at least 40 Russian soldiers. Drone footage shows the destruction of buildings at the checkpoint and Russian troops raising white flags as a sign of surrender.

The Ukrainian military, which posted the video on its official channels, said the operation was carried out by its 80th Air Assault Brigade and supported by artillery and heavy armored vehicles.

The International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights groups have stated that recording and disseminating even apparently voluntary statements by prisoners of war violates the prohibition against exposing them to “public curiosity” because they are inherently defenseless and entirely dependent on a hostile power for their well-being.

Neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian governments have disclosed how many Russian prisoners have been taken so far during the Kursk offensive.

The head of a prison in northeastern Ukraine holding soldiers captured during the offensive told a reporter during a visit this month that 320 Russians had passed through his facility in the past 10 days on their way to other prison camps in Ukraine. About 80 percent of the Russian soldiers held in the Ukrainian prison visited by The Post are conscripts, the prison chief said.

Before the Kursk invasion, Putin said that Russia was holding 6,465 Ukrainian soldiers and that Ukraine was holding 1,348 Russian soldiers captive. This means that the number of new prisoners taken during the Kursk offensive could represent a large portion of all Russian prisoners held in Ukraine.

It is not clear whether the capture was planned as part of the Kursk offensive or just a coincidental “icing on the cake,” says Mathieu Boulègue, a nonresident senior fellow in the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“I did not expect so many easy surrenders,” he said. “But it also shows how fragile the war narrative is in Russia, and it also shows how desperate these soldiers probably are, who would rather sit with Ukraine in Ukrainian prisons or cells than fight for Russia.”

The Russian forces in the Kursk offensive area were probably caught by surprise, were under the control of different ministries or organizations that did not communicate well with each other, and had no combat experience. All of this contributed to Ukraine's success, Massicot said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the capture of so many Russian prisoners as replenishing the “exchange fund” that trades soldiers for captured Ukrainian soldiers. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence service, said the return of the Azov Brigade fighters captured more than two years ago while defending the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol would be a priority.

The return of these prisoners is a sensitive issue in Ukraine. Large demonstrations demanding their release take place most weekends. Hundreds of them are said to still be in Russian captivity.