Hrustic described Beric as “concrete” but said he “didn’t promise anything special”.
“He said: ‘Everything goes according to the law, as determined by the Ministry of Defence.’”
Beric warned him, however, that the war was no game.
“He warned in particular that in the past few months the war was extremely dangerous,” Hrustic said.
Contacted via his profile on Russian social network VKontakte, Beric told BIRN: “A captured man will say anything expected of him.”
Hrustic was sent to the front and fought near the town of Kupiansk-Vuzlovyi, where he was captured.
“In the beginning, everyone thinks it’s good and not hard,” he said, “but when they go to the front, the situation changes quickly. Ninety per cent of per cent of people want to return.”
The officers treat contract soldiers “badly”, he said.
“You could say that they differentiate between contract soldiers and the professional army; they don’t consider them to be their people at all.”
As for fighters from the Balkans, Hrustic said most seemed to be from Serbia and some from Bosnia.
“I spoke with a Serbian commander who has his own formation there,” he said. “I met a Serb at the training ground, but he has been in Moscow for many years, there in Russia, and he has a Russian passport, he is officially Russian.”
According to data from the State Prisoners of War Centre of Ukraine, there are some 200 men from the Balkans fighting on the side of Russia.
Hrustic said the Russian army looked on soldiers “as if they were not people”.
“They send people to their deaths. And they have no sympathy for it at all,” he said.
“And they always follow the same logic. They never change the plan. They always send us on the same route where the drones always kill us in the same place. And that’s how it goes for three months, you know. And they never want to change the plan.”
The location of this interview is not specified due to Ukrainian prison service regulations.