How to avoid @ManyToOne child entities being fetched on save in Spring Data Jpa?

Question

I have a simple @Entity with a couple of @ManyToOne fields. I fetch the child entities from database and want to simply create a new instance of the parent entity and save that to database.

When I call myRepository.save(myParentObject) though, Hibernate first does a few selects, one for each field annotated with @ManyToOne, and the logs say very clearly Getting current persistent state for: [...]. Only once these 2 select operations are completed, the insert finally takes place.

The only solution I found to prevent these undesired select operations is declaring the ids of the child entities as @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY). I'm using natural ids though, so that doesn't really make sense, and I'd like to avoid that. Implementing Persistable on the child instances did not make any difference. How do I avoid the unnecessary selects while not using @GeneratedValues?

@Entity
public class NewspaperArticle {

  @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
  private Integer id;

  @NotNull @ManyToOne @JoinColumn(name="release")
  private ReleaseInfo releaseInfo;

  (...)
}

@Entity
@Table(name = "release_info")
public class ReleaseInfo implements Persistable<LocalDate> {

  // removing @GeneratedValue here causes an additional fetch to happen
  // before a save() on NewspaperArticle happens
  @Id @NotNull @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
  private LocalDate canonicalDate;
  (...)
}

UPDATE
A call like this

Optional<ReleaseInfo> maybeRelease = releaseInfoRepository.findById(<date>); 

NewspaperArticle article = new NewspaperArticle();
article.setReleaseInfo(maybeRelease.get()); 

newspaperArticleRepository.save(article);

would generate these logs