Where Russian prisoners were sent to the war. German captivity

According to Ukrainian data, there are several thousand Russians in the ATO, while only 39 people were captured.

The war in Donbass continues for the third year.

During this time, Ukraine has repeatedly announced the massive - many thousands - participation of the Russian military in hostilities.

However, according to yesterday's information from Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, only 39 Russian citizens are now under investigation, and six are behind bars. The trials were held behind the scenes, without the involvement of the media.

At the same time, there are dozens, if not hundreds of times more Ukrainians detained for work in the LDNR.

Korrespondent.net decided to collect all the versions about Russian participation in the ATO.

Ukrainian data

The Ukrainian side has repeatedly cited confirmation of the participation of the Russian military in the hostilities in the Donbass: from Pskov paratroopers to the detentions of special forces.

At the same time, data on the number of Russian military personnel stationed in Donbass is constantly different.
In June 2015, President Petro Poroshenko announced that there were 200,000 Russian troops in Ukraine.

“Today, on Putin’s orders, 200,000 people are on our territory, equipped with an arsenal of tanks and anti-aircraft missile launch systems. One of them shot down a civilian airliner from Malaysia last year.”, - quotes Mr. Poroshenko Corriere della Sera.

In April 2016, Poroshenko already stated that there were 6,000 regular Russian military personnel and a 40,000-strong army of militants in the combat zone in Donbas.

According to the Ministry of Defense, the number of Russians fighting for the LDNR is about 8,000 out of a 34,000 separatist army.

Western opinion

In the OSCE - the main international organization, which monitors the situation in the ATO zone - has never declared the presence of Russian personnel connections in the Donbass.

General Secretary Organization Lamberto Zannier stated that the presence of regular units Russian army in Ukraine "difficult to confirm".

"There have always been Russian citizens there, perhaps coming there for some reason, entering the region and supporting the separatists. We have evidence of people coming privately - we ourselves met with them and talked. However, are there any other Russian military units […] - this is more difficult to demonstrate" Zannier said.

But the United States, which does not participate in the Minsk and Normandy formats, has always been more categorical.

"Russian military and equipment are still in the Donbass. Russia is directly responsible for the implementation of the Minsk agreements", - said the American diplomat John Tefft.

US Ambassador to the OSCE Daniel Baer announced the continuation of the supply of Russian weapons to the Donbass.

“Russia shows no signs of stopping the aggression; on the contrary, it increased the intensity of the violence”, he emphasized.

Russian response

In April 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that there were no Russian troops in Ukraine.

"When asked whether or not there are our troops in Ukraine, I say frankly and definitely: there are no Russian troops in Ukraine" Putin replied.

At his press conference in December 2015, Putin noted that there were no regular Russian troops in Ukraine, but acknowledged that there were people there who "decided military issues."

"We have never said that there are no people there who deal with certain issues in the military sphere, but this does not mean that regular Russian troops are present there, feel the difference"- said Putin.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has always denied everything.

“We see that the Ukrainian side is now trying to justify its inability to fulfill what it signed up to with references to the difficult security situation, to the “mythical” presence of Russian troops – which has never been confirmed and proven by anyone. Launched “disinformation” floats in the media space, as we can verify this today", - says Lavrov.

What's up with things

39 Russian citizens have been prosecuted for unleashing a war against Ukraine, six of whom have already received prison sentences. This was stated by Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.

"A total of 39 citizens have been prosecuted for participating in unleashing and waging an aggressive war against Ukraine at the moment. Russian Federation, of which 31 are servicemen of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Indictments against 10 citizens of the Russian Federation have been sent to the court, of which 6 have already been sentenced to imprisonment for a term of 11 to 15 years., said the Attorney General.

The Prosecutor General's Office also notified 18 persons from among the representatives of the authorities and leadership of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, including Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation Sergei Glazyev and Head of the Russian Defense Ministry Sergei Shoigu, of suspicion of committing crimes against the foundations of the national security of Ukraine.

German captivity of that time is not the same as captivity in World War II. The camps of the Great War were not stalls of slaves and not the production of death, but the forges of Germanophiles and cheap labor.

The policy of separation of prisoners and conflicts

According to German statistics, 1,420,479 Russian soldiers and 14,050 officers were captured during the war years. After arriving from the front, prisoners of war were divided into companies or barracks, headed by a non-commissioned officer of the company's nationality. The division of prisoners along ethnic lines was also one of the most important elements of the German management of prisoners - Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, Georgians were offered better conditions of detention in combination with propaganda literature. After the war, the prisoners were to become the conductors of the Germanophile and anti-Russian policy at home. Often, prisoners from the national outskirts of the empire, especially Ukrainians and Georgians, themselves resisted this processing, the spreading propaganda literature was collected and hidden, and those who were susceptible to it were beaten. Those who agreed to cooperate with the camp administration were called traitors and were threatened with reprisals.

Russian prisoners in Germany were brought up in the national spirit

Officers (a rank higher than non-commissioned officers) and soldiers were kept separately - this was also supposed to international agreements, and that officers do not organize sabotage, escape or other anti-German actions involving soldiers.

Control in captivity was also established with the help of the prisoners themselves. Non-commissioned officers in the barracks had to cooperate with the camp commandant's office and maintain the established order. If everything went well, the officer received a monetary reward. Thanks to all sorts of gifts like tobacco, food, expedited mail to their homeland, the commandant's offices acquired groups of "trusted" prisoners who reported various kinds of information about the Russian army, about the behavior and mood of other prisoners.

Knowledgeable people were recruited among the prisoners German to work as translators and overseers in compulsory work in the kitchen, in the field or in craft workshops. Non-commissioned officers and translators, trying to maintain their privileged position in the service of the Germans, often mistreated their compatriots. Social conflicts between officers and soldiers, characteristic of the Russian army, persisted in captivity. One soldier who escaped from captivity said later: “It was good until our elders took over. And then the Germans gave them the right to beat and flog us with rods, and it became worse with their elders ... When the prisoners began to manage themselves, at that time they started all sorts of thefts and troubles ... We lived among ourselves in quarrels that occurred because of food " .

Swearing and disobedience to non-commissioned officers were the most common violations of camp rules. In captivity, where there was a constant lack of basic necessities, the familiar environment of communication and connection with the house, an atmosphere of complete solidarity was rarely created in a nervous atmosphere.

There were even conflicts between the camps, for example, because of the right to be the first to go home in 1918. Not a single camp “wanted to share places with strangers” and filled up German institutions and the Soviet Bureau for Prisoners of War in Germany with demands to send them home as soon as possible .

At the same time, against the backdrop of a revolutionary explosion in Russia and the German policy of disunity, national conflicts also escalated among the prisoners. The Germans recorded cases of bloody fights between captives minded in the national and imperial spirit, especially after the declaration of independence of Ukraine. The Russians were angry at the natives of Ukraine who supported the independence, wrote to the Russian organizations that sent aid to the camps, demanding to stop supporting the now independent Ukrainians.

Military camps: self-management

In the camps of the First World War, it was common practice to allow self-government - the prisoners opened shops in the camps, carried out artistic activities, sought charitable help and distributed. Camp self-government committees collected libraries, built small churches, organized lectures, hobby groups up to the most exotic among officers (for example, the sunbathing society in Neuss). The German commandants reserved the right to punish the prisoners in case of violations of the order, for example, by canceling concerts and performances for some time.

The camp committees themselves determined the penalties for petty offenses. For example, for the illegal trade in "dog" (moonshine) they could be sentenced to several days of "scoop", that is, cleaning toilets, and for more serious violations, the prisoner could spend several nights outside the barracks and sleep on the street even in bad weather.

With the permission of the camp management, the prisoners were released to work on nearby farms and workshops, to sell the goods they produced (the Germans were especially in demand for carpentry with Russian carvings). Part of the proceeds went into the pocket of the workers, part - for the maintenance of the camp. The prisoners had the opportunity to correspond and receive parcels, the opportunity to file complaints and requests to international and Russian organizations, to negotiate work with German enterprises outside the camp.

Hunger and censorship

Although the Germans did not lead to mass deadly starvation, there was never ample food for prisoners, especially at the end of the war, when Germany was experiencing a severe food crisis. Those who did not have access to agricultural work suffered the worst. It was also possible to ask for a food parcel from home, but the prisoners were not allowed to report home about hunger and other problems of captivity. The prisoners showed considerable ingenuity in circumventing postal censorship. One prisoner wrote home: "I live here with Yermolai Kormilich Golodukhin, whom you will soon meet, we are inseparable." Not every translator, who daily checked dozens and hundreds of letters written in Russian handwriting of varying quality, could pay attention to such a trick. Some censors, especially Russian Germans, still managed to detect allegory in the mail. For example, one soldier wrote with humor that he lives "... as on the Vyborg side", the other - that he lives "no worse than in our boarding house in the village of Medvedskaya." At the same time, it was about psychiatric hospitals or prisons in Russia.

At work. (topwar.ru)

Another prisoner, an officer, made a reference to the Bible in the text of the letter: “2 Cor. 11 - 27". Having opened the Scripture in the indicated place, we read the words: “in labor and exhaustion, often in vigilance, in hunger and thirst, often in fasting, in cold and nakedness.”

Homecoming

The return of prisoners in the conditions that began in Russia civil war turned into a lot of problems, especially in 1918, when the prisoners were in huge masses, sometimes tens of thousands of people a day. Their meeting was often poorly prepared, people were transported crowded, they were not adequately provided with medicines, food and clothing (especially in winter). Many died along the way. According to the memoirs of the writer V. B. Shklovsky, on some cars there were instructions: “If you die, they will take you to Kursk and bury them in the“ burnt forest ”, and the coffins [will be taken] back.” More or less safely arrived mostly those who had food and money in reserve from the camps, that is, primarily those who worked in various German enterprises.

The exact number of Soviet prisoners of war of the Great Patriotic War is still unknown. Four to six million people. What did the captured Soviet soldiers and officers have to go through in the Nazi camps?

The numbers speak

The question of the number of Soviet prisoners of war during the Second World War is still debatable. In German historiography, this figure reaches 6 million people, although the German command spoke of 5 million 270 thousand.
However, one should take into account the fact that, violating the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the German authorities included in the prisoners of war not only soldiers and officers of the Red Army, but also employees of party organs, partisans, underground fighters, as well as the entire male population from 16 to 55 years old, retreating along with Soviet troops.

According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the loss of prisoners in the Second World War amounted to 4 million 559 thousand people, and the commission of the Ministry of Defense chaired by M. A. Gareev announced about 4 million.
The complexity of the calculation is largely due to the fact that Soviet prisoners of war until 1943 did not receive registration numbers.

It is precisely established that 1,836,562 people returned from German captivity. Their further fate is as follows: 1 million were sent for further military service, 600 thousand - to work in industry, more than 200 thousand - to the NKVD camps, as they compromised themselves in captivity.

Early years

Most Soviet prisoners of war account for the first two years of the war. In particular, after the unsuccessful Kyiv defensive operation in September 1941, about 665 thousand soldiers and officers of the Red Army were captured by the Germans, and after the failure of the Kharkov operation in May 1942, more than 240 thousand Red Army soldiers got to the German troops.

First of all, the German authorities conducted a filtration: the commissars, communists and Jews were immediately liquidated, and the rest were transferred to special camps that were hastily created. Most of them were on the territory of Ukraine - about 180. Only in the infamous Bohunia camp (Zhytomyr region) there were up to 100 thousand Soviet soldiers.

The prisoners had to make grueling forced marches - 50-60 km a day. The journey often dragged on for a whole week. Food on the march was not provided, so the soldiers were content with pasture: everything went for food - spikelets of wheat, berries, acorns, mushrooms, foliage, bark and even grass.
The instruction ordered the guards to destroy all the exhausted. During the movement of the 5,000th column of prisoners of war in the Luhansk region, on a 45-kilometer stretch of the road, the guards killed 150 people with a “shot of mercy”.

As the Ukrainian historian Grigory Golysh notes, about 1.8 million Soviet prisoners of war died on the territory of Ukraine, which is approximately 45% of the total number of victims among the prisoners of war of the USSR.

Soviet prisoners of war were in much harsher conditions than the soldiers of other countries. Germany called the formal basis for this that Soviet Union did not sign the 1907 Hague Convention and did not accede to the 1929 Geneva Convention.

In fact, the German authorities followed the directive of the high command, according to which the communists and commissars were not recognized as soldiers, and no international legal protection extended to them. With the beginning of the war, this applied to all prisoners of war of the Red Army.

Discrimination against Soviet prisoners of war manifested itself in everything. For example, unlike other prisoners, they often did not receive winter clothes and were involved exclusively in the most difficult work. Also, the activities of the International Red Cross did not apply to Soviet prisoners.

In the camps, intended exclusively for prisoners of war, the conditions were even more appalling. Only a small part of the prisoners were accommodated in relatively adapted rooms, while the majority, due to the incredible crowding, could not only lie down, but also stand. And someone was completely deprived of a roof over his head.

In the camp for Soviet prisoners of war - "Uman Pit" prisoners were in the open air, where there was no way to hide from the heat, wind or rain. The "Uman Pit", in fact, has turned into a huge mass grave. “The dead lay next to the living for a long time. No one paid any attention to the corpses, there were so many of them,” recalled the surviving prisoners.

diet

In one of the orders of the director of the German concern IG Farbenindustry, it was noted that "increasing the productivity of prisoners of war can be achieved by reducing the rate of food distribution." This directly applied to Soviet prisoners.

However, in order to maintain the efficiency of prisoners of war, it was necessary to charge an additional food ration. For a week, she looked like this: 50 gr. codfish, 100 gr. artificial honey and up to 3.5 kg. potatoes. However, supplementary nutrition could only be obtained for 6 weeks.

The usual diet of prisoners of war can be seen in the example of Stalag No. 2 in Hammerstein. On the day the prisoners received 200 gr. bread, ersatz coffee and vegetable soup. The nutritional value of the diet did not exceed 1000 calories. In the zone of Army Group Center, the daily bread norm for prisoners of war was even less - 100 grams.

For comparison, let's name the food supply standards for German prisoners of war in the USSR. On the day they received 600 gr. bread, 500 gr. potatoes, 93 gr. meat and 80 gr. croup.
What Soviet prisoners of war were fed was not much like food. Ersatz bread, which in Germany was called "Russian" had the following composition: 50% rye bran, 20% beets, 20% cellulose, 10% straw. However, the “hot lunch” looked even less edible: in fact, it was a scoop of stinking liquid from poorly washed horse giblets, and this “food” was cooked in boilers that used to cook asphalt.
Non-working prisoners of war were also deprived of such food, and therefore their chances of survival were reduced to zero.

Work

By the end of 1941, a colossal need for manpower, mainly in the military industry, was revealed in Germany, and it was decided to make up for the shortage primarily at the expense of Soviet prisoners of war. This situation saved many Soviet soldiers and officers from the mass extermination planned by the Nazi authorities.

According to the German historian G. Mommsen, "with proper nutrition" the productivity of Soviet prisoners of war was 80%, and in other cases 100% of the productivity of German workers. In the mining and metallurgical industry, this figure was less - 70%.

Mommsen noted that Soviet prisoners constituted "the most important and profitable labor force", even cheaper than concentration camp prisoners. Income to the state treasury, received as a result of the labor of Soviet workers, amounted to hundreds of millions of marks. According to another German historian, W. Herbert, a total of 631,559 prisoners of war of the USSR were employed in Germany.
Soviet prisoners of war often had to learn a new specialty: they became electricians, mechanics, mechanics, turners, tractor drivers. Wages were piecework and provided for a bonus system. But, isolated from the workers of other countries, Soviet prisoners of war worked 12 hours a day.

Resistance

Unlike other prisoners of concentration camps, for example, Jews, among the Soviet prisoners of war there was no single and mass resistance movement. Researchers name many reasons explaining this phenomenon: this is the effective work of the security service, and the constant hunger experienced by the Soviet military. As an important factor, they also note that Stalin called all Soviet prisoners "traitors", and Nazi propaganda did not fail to take advantage of this.

However, since 1943, pockets of protest among Soviet prisoners of war began to arise more and more often. So, in the Zeithain Stalag, the Soviet writer Stepan Zlobin became the central figure around whom the Resistance was organized. With his comrades, he began to publish the newspaper "The Truth about the Prisoners." Gradually, Zlobin's group grew to 21 people.
A larger-scale resistance among Soviet prisoners of war, according to historians, began in 1944, when there was confidence in the inevitable death of the Nazi regime. But even then, not everyone wanted to risk their lives, hoping for a speedy release.

Mortality

According to German historians, up to February 1942, up to 6,000 Soviet soldiers and officers were destroyed daily in prisoner of war camps. Often this was done by gassing entire barracks. Only on the territory of Poland, according to local authorities, 883,485 Soviet prisoners of war were buried.

It has now been established that the Soviet military were the first to be tested with poisonous substances in concentration camps. Later, this method was widely used to exterminate Jews.
Many Soviet prisoners of war died from diseases. In October 1941, in one of the branches of the Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex, where Soviet soldiers were kept, a typhus epidemic broke out, killing about 6,500 people during the winter. However, without waiting for a lethal outcome, the camp authorities destroyed many of them with gas right in the barracks.
Mortality was high among the wounded prisoners. Health care Soviet prisoners were extremely rare. Nobody cared about them: they were killed both during the marches and in the camps. The diet of the wounded rarely exceeded 1,000 calories a day, let alone the quality of the food. They were doomed to die.

Return

Those few soldiers who survived the horrors of German captivity faced a difficult test in their homeland. They needed to prove that they were not traitors.

By a special directive of Stalin at the end of 1941, special filtration and testing camps were created in which former prisoners of war were placed.
In the deployment zone of six fronts - four Ukrainian and two Belarusian - more than 100 such camps were created. By July 1944, almost 400 thousand prisoners of war had passed a "special check" in them. The vast majority of them were handed over to the district military registration and enlistment offices, about 20 thousand became personnel for the defense industry, 12 thousand filled the assault battalions, and more than 11 thousand were arrested and convicted.

In 1941, the Germans took 4 million prisoners, of which 3 died in the first six months of captivity. This is one of the most heinous crimes of the German Nazis. The prisoners were kept for months in barbed wire pens, under the open sky, they were not fed, people ate grass and earthworms. Hunger, thirst, unsanitary conditions, deliberately arranged by the Germans, did their job. This massacre was against the customs of warfare, against the economic needs of Germany itself. Pure ideology - the more subhumans die, the better.

Minsk. July 5, 1942 Prisoner of war camp "Drozdy". Consequences of the Minsk-Bialystok boiler: 140 thousand people on 9 hectares in the open air

Minsk, August 1941 Himmler came to see the prisoners of war. A very strong photo. The gaze of a prisoner and the gaze of the SS men on the other side of the thorn...

June 1941 Raseiniai area (Lithuania). The crew of the KV-1 tank was captured. The tanker in the center looks like Budanov ... This is the 3rd mechanized corps, they met the war on the border. In a 2-day oncoming tank battle 06/23-24/1941 in Lithuania, the corps was defeated

Vinnitsa, July 28, 1941 Since the prisoners were hardly fed, the local population tried to help them. Ukrainian women with baskets, plates at the gates of the camp...

There. Apparently, the guards still allowed to transfer food for a thorn

August 1941 Umanskaya Yama concentration camp. It is also Stalag (prefabricated camp) No. 349. It was arranged in a quarry of a brick factory in Uman (Ukraine). In the summer of 1941, prisoners from the Uman cauldron were kept here, 50,000 people. Under the open sky, as in a paddock

Vasily Mishchenko was in the rank of lieutenant when he was captured in the Uman cauldron. But not only soldiers and junior commanders fell into the boilers. And the generals too. In the picture: Generals Ponedelin and Kirillov, they commanded the Soviet troops near Uman:

The Germans used this photo in propaganda leaflets. The Germans are smiling, but General Kirillov (on the left, in a cap with a torn star) has a very sad look ... This photo session does not bode well

Again Ponedelin and Kirillov. Lunch in captivity

It is clear that they were not traitors. Forced staged photos are not their fault. The only thing they can be accused of is professional incompetence. They let him surround themselves in a cauldron. They are not alone here. Future marshals Konev and Eremenko ruined two fronts in the Vyazemsky pocket (October 1941, 700 thousand prisoners), Timoshenko and Bagramyan - the entire Southwestern Front in the Kharkov pocket (May 1942, 300 thousand prisoners). Zhukov, of course, did not fall into the cauldrons of entire fronts, but for example, commanding the Western Front in the winter of 1941-42. a couple of armies (33rd and 39th) did drive into the environment.

Vyazemsky cauldron, October 1941. While the generals were learning to fight, endless columns of prisoners walked along the roads

Vyazma, November 1941. The infamous Dulag-184 (transit camp) on Kronstadskaya Street. Mortality here reached 200-300 people per day. The dead were simply thrown into the pits

Relatives of the dead prisoners regularly come here and made their own memorial, on the fence of the plant

Stalag 10D (Witzendorf, Germany), autumn 1941. Corpses of dead Soviet prisoners are thrown from a wagon

In the autumn of 1941, the death of prisoners became massive. Cold added to hunger, epidemic typhus(it was carried by lice). There were cases of cannibalism.

November 1941, Stalag 305 in Novo-Ukrainka (Kirovograd region). These four (on the left) ate the corpse of this prisoner (on the right)

Deblin (Poland), a batch of prisoners arrived at Stalag-307. People are in a terrible state. On the right - a camp policeman in Budyonovka (a former prisoner), stands by the body of a prisoner lying on the platform

Physical punishment. Two policemen in Soviet uniform: one holds the prisoner, the other beats with a whip or stick. The German in the background is laughing. Another prisoner in the background is standing tied to a fence post (also a form of punishment in prisoner camps)

Alexander Ioselevich, a captured military doctor, describes how the selection took place in a camp in Jelgava (Latvia) in July 1941:

“They brought crackers and coffee to the camp. There is an SS man, next to a dog and next to him a prisoner of war. And when people go for crackers, he says: "This is a political instructor." They take him out and shoot him right next to him. The traitor is poured coffee and two crackers. "And this is Yude." A Jew is taken out - shot, and again two crackers. “And this one was an Enkvedist.” They take him out - they shoot him, and again two crackers.

Life in the camp in Jelgava was inexpensively valued: 2 crackers. However, as usual in Russia in wartime, people appeared from somewhere who could not be broken by any executions, and could not be bought for crackers.

The war in Donbass continues for the third year.

During this time, Ukraine has repeatedly announced the mass - many thousands - participation in hostilities.

However, according to yesterday's data from Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, six are now under investigation, and six are behind bars. The trials were held behind the scenes, without the involvement of the media.

At the same time, there are dozens, if not hundreds of times more Ukrainians detained for work in the LDNR.

Correspondent.net decided to collect all the versions about Russian participation in the ATO.

Ukrainian data

The Ukrainian side has repeatedly cited confirmation of the participation of the Russian military in the hostilities in the Donbass: from Pskov paratroopers to the detentions of special forces.

At the same time, data on the number of Russian military personnel stationed in Donbass is constantly different.

In June 2015, President Petro Poroshenko announced that there were 200,000 Russian troops in Ukraine.

“Today, on Putin’s orders, 200,000 people are on our territory, equipped with an arsenal of tanks and anti-aircraft missile launch systems. One of them shot down a civilian airliner from Malaysia last year,” Corriere della Sera quoted Mr. Poroshenko as saying.

In April 2016, Poroshenko already stated that there were 6,000 regular Russian military personnel and a 40,000-strong army of militants in the combat zone in Donbas.

According to the Ministry of Defense, the number of Russians fighting for the LDNR is .

Western opinion

The OSCE, the main international organization that monitors the situation in the ATO zone, has never declared the presence of Russian personnel units in the Donbass.

Organization Secretary General Lamberto Zannier stated that the presence of regular units of the Russian army in Ukraine.

"There have always been Russian citizens there, perhaps coming there for some reason, entering the region and supporting the separatists. We have evidence of people coming privately - we ourselves met with them and talked. However, are there any other Russian military units […] is more difficult to demonstrate," Zannier said.

But the United States, which does not participate in the Minsk and Normandy formats, has always been more categorical.

"Russian military and equipment are still in the Donbas. Russia is directly responsible for the implementation of the Minsk agreements," said US diplomat John Tefft.

US Ambassador to the OSCE Daniel Baer announced the continuation of the supply of Russian weapons to the Donbass.

“Russia shows no signs of stopping the aggression; on the contrary, it increased the intensity of the violence,” he stressed.

Russian response

In April 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that there were no Russian troops in Ukraine.

"When asked whether or not there are our troops in Ukraine, I say frankly and definitely: there are no Russian troops in Ukraine," Putin replied.

At his press conference in December 2015, Putin noted that there are no regular Russian troops in Ukraine "deciding military issues."

"We have never said that there are no people there who deal with certain issues in the military sphere, but this does not mean that regular Russian troops are present there, feel the difference," Putin said.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has always denied everything.

“We see that the Ukrainian side is now trying to justify its inability to fulfill what it signed up to with references to the difficult security situation, to the “mythical” presence of Russian troops – which has never been confirmed and proven by anyone. Launched “disinformation” floats in the media space, as we can see today," Lavrov says.

What's up with things

For unleashing a war against Ukraine, 39 Russian citizens have been prosecuted, six of whom have already received prison terms. This was stated by Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.

"In total, 39 citizens of the Russian Federation, of which 31 are servicemen of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, have been prosecuted for participating in unleashing and waging an aggressive war against Ukraine at the moment. Indictments have been sent to the court against 10 citizens of the Russian Federation, of which 6 have already been sentenced to imprisonment for a term of 11 to 15 years," the Prosecutor General said.

The Prosecutor General's Office also notified 18 persons from among the representatives of the authorities and leadership of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, including Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation Sergei Glazyev and Head of the Russian Defense Ministry Sergei Shoigu, of suspicion of committing crimes against the foundations of the national security of Ukraine.