MOSCOW, March 27. /TASS/. Captured Ukrainian serviceman Alexander Praskovya has disclosed that he had undergone training for over a month in Estonia for conducting ground assaults.
"We were offered to go abroad for training, in Estonia, and I agreed. We spent one month and one week there. We were trained to storm trenches, fields, buildings, to dig in; we [studied] designations, machine guns, grenade launchers. And with this knowledge we were sent back to Ukraine," he said in a video published by the Russian Defense Ministry.
The POW added that out of the group of soldiers he had trained together with, every other one has been killed over the past six months, 17 people in total, with the majority of losses incurred by Russian drones.
"In the morning, I went to get water and could not return because the drones became active. I waited until the evening, hiding. When I was returning to my position, it had already gotten dark and I didn’t know where it was. The terrain had changed because of explosions. I began to call out to my fellow soldiers so that they wouldn’t shoot me by accident. And when I got where I needed to, Russian troops were already there," he said, describing the circumstances of how he was taken prisoner.
Praskovya also said that his company was seriously understaffed. His unit numbered only 20, out of whom only five were capable of engaging in combat by the time of his capture because the rest had been killed or wounded.