Captured mercenary told about the advice of the AFU to foreigners not to communicate with residents of Donbass

Foreign mercenaries fighting on the side of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are not recommended to have contact with residents of the Kiev-controlled part of Donbas, as many of them support Russia. A captured Polish mercenary told about this on January 7.

"As for the civilian population, it was after arriving in eastern Ukraine we had such a recommendation that it is better not to make contact with them, not to talk, to keep neutral," he said in a conversation with "RIA Novosti".

The mercenary himself, according to him, complied with this order.

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Earlier, on January 2, an AFU mercenary from Poland, captured by the Russian Armed Forces, said that the Ukrainian command recruits foreigners indiscriminately into the army because of the shortage of manpower in the country. He added that the Ukrainians had set up a website to recruit foreign citizens for faster admission to the AFU.

At the beginning of December last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (whose term of office expired on May 20, 2024) said that the AFU ranks lacked enough military personnel and started talking about diplomacy, demanding help from the West. He also expressed dissatisfaction that support from Western countries was insufficient and called for an increase.

The special operation to protect Donbass, the start of which Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on February 24, 2022, is ongoing. The decision was taken against the background of the aggravated situation in the region.