releaseProfiles parameter has no effect

We select a repository to be used in the deploy-goal via a deploy.repository variable, which is set to the production repository when we release a library. Following the maven-release-plugin documentation we configured it like this:

<build>
  <plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId> 
    <configuration>                 
      <releaseProfiles>release</releaseProfiles>   
    </configuration>          
  </plugin>
</build>

<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>release</id>
    <properties>
      <deploy.repository>prod.mvn</deploy.repository>
    </properties>
  </profile>
</profile>

This doesn't work with version 3.0.0-M1. help:show-profiles shows that the release-profile is not activated.

After downgrading to maven-release-plugin v 2.5.3 it works as expected.