For three days, shells and mortars were “flying and whistling overhead, exploding around us,” Anton, a Russian soldier positioned south of Bakhmut, tells CNN. “We were jumping like rabbits under mortar rounds and bombs.”

When it got quieter, he and fellow soldier Slava fell asleep. The sound of a roaring engine and shooting soon woke them up, and shelling eventually blew out the logs covering the foxhole they were hiding in.

“There was a crater right at the entrance. And then it went silent. It was dead silent. And my friend told me, let’s run,” recalls Slava, now in the custody of Ukrainian soldiers.

They ran, jumping over craters and bodies blown to pieces by incessant shelling, into another foxhole. They could hear a vehicle and the voice of Ukrainian soldiers moving above them, he says.

Anton had one rifle and one grenade. He says he heard a click, and two grenades were thrown in. The depth of the foxhole protected them from the blast.

“It was silent for a while, then (the Ukrainians) came back. I thought that was the end,” Anton says. He believed he would either be executed or brutally tortured.
“I switched the rifle to single shot mode, and I thought I would shoot myself. But I couldn’t,” he says, breaking into tears. He sobs silently and lights up a cigarette offered by a Ukrainian soldier.

He is one of eight Russian soldiers held by the Ukrainian Third Assault Brigade at a makeshift jail in eastern Ukraine. The men were kept in small cells without natural ventilation or sunlight, but with access to food, water and cigarettes.

CNN interviewed three of them before their transfer to Ukrainian intelligence, in rare access to POWs at this stage of detention. CNN is not using their real names and has concealed their identities to avoid possible negative consequences upon their return to Russia, and with regard to guidance published by the International Committee of the Red Cross on the reporting of POWs.

In the presence of two Ukrainian soldiers, the three men described low morale in their trenches, disarray and the apparent expendability of some Russian forces. They did not appear to be speaking under duress.

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