From Halya Coynash:
The court hearing on Nov 23 in the trial of two Russians captured in May 2015 in eastern Ukraine demonstrated yet again what an uphill battle the men’s defence lawyers will have to convince anybody that their clients, Yevgeny Yerofeyev and Aleksandr Aleksandrov, were not active Russian military intelligence officers [GRU]. Efforts at previous hearings to claim that the men had been pressured or even tortured into presenting themselves as GRU officers fail to explain why they told this to everybody, including their compatriots during one to one conversations.
….The men were visited in hospital on May 20 by representatives of the OSCE Monitoring Mission who pointed out that they spoke to them “without the presence of Ukrainian authorities” and that both had said that they were Russian military servicemen on a reconnaissance mission. They were also seen by the International Red Cross who did not express any concern.
Read more at More evidence that captured Russians were military intelligence officers :: khpg.org