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I've been seeing alot of videos of Russian POWs saying they did not even know they were going into war. Many of them say they were told it was an exercise and didn't know they were in a war until they started taking casualties. Wtf is going on in Russia? Thats some Stalin shit right there...
From what I've read, a lot of those guys are conscripts - draftees, in American terms. With a few exceptions, all young men in Russia are required by law to spend at least a year in the military. I've read that conscripts are not supposed to be used in active military campaigns outside of Russia, but I guess Putin's belief that Ukraine is _really_ just part of Russia allowed them to slide over that inconvenient point.
It's a completely different system to what currently exists in the USA, the UK and most of the other European nations. In those countries, everyone in the military has made a decision that they want to signup. Russians can do that too and sign a contract, but the very fact that Russian conscripts haven't done that indicates they don't really want to be in the military; they're only in uniform because they have to be. And, as is always the case with any military, the guys getting shot at are only there because politicians and senior officers decided they should be there.
So you've got a bunch of guys - some as young as 18 or 19, some of whom have been in the army for just a few months - who suddenly find themselves being shot at, their buds going down as they're hit and and shit blowing up around them. And, as you say, it does seem that at least some of them were told that the Ukrainians would be cool with them being in the country when they got their orders to drive across the border and advance. What's more, it has become very clear that the Russian army totally screwed the pooch when they planned the invasion. They believed Ukraine would rapidly collapse, so they supplied the troops with just a few days worth of food, fuel and ammunition, and there were unarmed or very lightly armed convoys of supply and support vehicles which had no armour, air or artillery back-up support when they came under attack.
It's not surprising these guys ended up wondering what the fuck was going on, just wanted to get the hell out of there when shit started going down, and ended up in a state of shock and emotional collapse when the Ukrainians took them prisoner.