Armed men held about 40 people in the basement of a house in the village of Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, in the Kyiv region, and four were taken out and brought to a hospital after the crowd demanded that a doctor be let in — at the scene, the head of Ukraine’s National Guard, Oleksandr Pivnenko, said military personnel of his department, including those who had left their units without permission, were in the basement, and there was a confrontation with the police.

According to Ukrainian media reports, the alleged prison was said to be a building of the Azov Battalion, a National Guard unit created in 2014. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the lack of public reaction from Western human rights organizations did not surprise Moscow and that European bodies try to shield the Ukrainian leadership — and said Ukrainians who do not want to fight for Kyiv may surrender to Russian troops.