Mikhailovich said his men had been duped into believing they were rescuing the country from Nazis and were surprised to be met with a fight.
The prisoners first appeared in front of the cameras and talked to journalists.
Three Russian police officers arrived at the news agency accompanied by security forces.
A representative of the special Rapid Response Unit, Senior Commissioner for the Department of Internal Affairs, Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Mikhailovich Astakhov, inspector of the information and documentation group of the mobile special purpose unit Evgeny Viktorovich Spiridonov and senior police sergeant, an employee of the mobile special purpose unit of the city of Novokuznetsk in the Kemerovo region Vitalievich Plotnikov were taken prisoner.
Mikhailovich said his men had been duped into believing they were rescuing the country from Nazis and were surprised to be met with a fight.
—Jackie Singh 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 (@hackingbutlegal) March 6, 2022
An unnamed senior US defense official told Voice of America on Tuesday that many on the Russian side were conscripts with no experience of real fighting.
“Some of them weren’t even told they were going to be in combat,” he said.
“We’ve seen a number of anecdotal reports by young Russian soldiers saying, ‘I didn’t even know I was here. I thought I was on exercises. No one told me I was going to war. No one told me I was going to kill Ukrainians,’” he said.
At a striking presentation last week at the United Nations, Ukraine’s ambassador presented a text-message exchange he said was between a Russian soldier and his mother before he was killed.
In the texts, the unnamed soldier appeared to inform his mother that he was not really on a training mission and had instead been deployed into a “real war.”
“We were told that they would welcome us,” the the exchange said, but instead the locals were “falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass.”
“They call us fascists,” the texts added. “Mama, this is so hard.”
—CSPAN (@cspan) February 28, 2022
Accounts of ignorance of the impending invasion within the armed forces track with those from elsewhere in the Russian state.