Russian Soldier Who Went To Ukraine Thought It Would Be 'Warm And Interesting' Like Syria

A Russian soldier, who is now a prisoner of war in Ukraine, has opened up about how Kremlin commanders brought them to Ukraine, claiming it was for a "three-day peacekeeping mission."

Kirill Bekleshov, a 21-year-old contract soldier from Pskov Oblast in Russia, said he did not know anything about Ukraine and "was not interested in what was happening here."

"We went to the exercises in Kursk initially and were about to leave when we were sent to Belgorod. We stood 15 kilometers on the border with Ukraine, and then the battalion commander came in the night and said: 'We will stop by Ukraine for three days. We will stand as peacekeepers and be back.' They promised that a train would take us back on March 1. They explained that we must protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians from the Nazis," Kirill told Ukrainian vlogger Vladimir Zolkin. The video has been uploaded to the YouTube channel of Zolkin.

The soldier was wounded one month into the invasion, and was taken captive by Ukrainian troops on March 25. His contract was with the 25th motorized rifle brigade from Luga (military unit 29760).

According to Kirill's friends, he joined the army because serving two years would earn him a salary of 30,000 rubles per month besides the position of the "double bass", as contractors are called in military slang.

Kirill's friend Viktor Kiyashchenko told North Realities, a wing of Radio Liberty, that they all believed the Ukraine stint would be like Syria.

"He was on a business trip to Syria last year, and he really liked it there. There was not a single shot, but warm, interesting and good money. We thought that it would be like in Syria, that they would just go, stand at the border, stay there and leave. We did not imagine that there would be such large-scale hostilities," said Kiyashchenko, adding that nobody would have gone to Ukraine if they had an inkling of the war.

Kirill's mother, 44-year-old Olga Bekleshova, said she found out that her son was fighting in Ukraine only a week after the war began. She rang her son, who told her not to worry and "watch the news for negotiations between Putin and Zelensky."

The soldier told his mother that he would be back home on March 20. "I prepared everything, waited, but he never arrived. And, I hear he has been in captivity for three months now," the mother added.

Bekleshova learned about her son's captivity from the mother of another prisoner Vadim Galeev on March 29. Kirill's picture was among the images of soldiers that circulated in VKontakte chat.

She contacted the Ministry of Defense in Moscow and informed them about her son's injuries and that he was in the Kharkiv pre-trial detention center. "They constantly asked me from where I got such information. Until April 11, they told me that he was not on the black lists, that he was not missing, he had not died and he was fighting. And then they already admitted that he was in captivity," Bekleshova told North Realities.