Conscripts who escaped from the border as the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) broke through are being forced to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense and will be sent them back to the front lines, the independent Russian news site Verstka reported on Tuesday, Aug. 13, citing two of the conscripts’ mothers.
According to one of them about 150 conscripts are currently in her son’s military unit in the Kursk region. They have been told that “you will follow the stormtroopers, to clear the territory” and are promised benefits and “combat” pay of up to 4,500 rubles ($50) a day. She said her boy was convinced that they will “be sent anyway,” and if they don’t sign, they would face trial.
The woman who the article calls “Elena,” though it is not her real name, said: “They’re putting moral pressure on them, they’re trying to brainwash them and send our children to that hole.”
The mother of another conscript, “Marina” – whose name has also been changed – said that the those in charge of their sons are trying to persuade them to sign because they have been given a quota to fill.
She said that her son called her about 30 minutes earlier and told her that they will become members of the SVO – the so-called special military operation. “He says that there are about 150 conscripts who are little more than children there now, who have been chosen from those who got away in the region.”
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Marina said that her son had been called up from the Belgorod region and had been sent to the Kursk in April. After the start of Ukraine’s breakthrough on Aug. 6, he had been out of contact for four days.
She went on: “Our president said that conscripts would not be in the Northern Military District [the formation fighting against Ukraine]. My boy should not have taken part in the fighting, why did this happen? He already saw things that he should not have seen.
“If they wanted him to defend the borders, then why didn’t they prepare him? Why did he spend six months just carrying shells and then digging trenches for six months?”
Marina added: “Of course, I understand that the border needs to be defended – I myself live in an area where sirens sound five to six times a day. And my son lived like that until he went into the army. But what next?”
Another conscript, who was evacuated from the border areas, told Verstka that several of his comrades had initially been moved to hospital in Kursk with concussions but were taken away the day before. An officer said that they were being transferred to a military unit in Klintsy in the Bryansk region, but they were not there.
“Everyone understands,” he said, that they were being returned to somewhere near the border so that they could take part in battles again.
Grigory Sverdlin, director of the human rights project “Walk Through the Forest,” says that many of the conscripts were sent from units in other regions to the Kursk region as part of a “business trip.” Some of them came from the Voronezh and Leningrad regions and they understand that fresh lists are already being prepared to send the next groups.
Despite what President Vladimir Putin has said about conscripts not being sent to the battlefield, human rights activists point out that the legislation covering conscription allows recruits to be sent to perform tasks during armed conflicts, including actual fighting.
Following Ukraine’s Aug. 6 incursion, Russian conscripts were killed and captured by the AFU in the Kursk region as evidenced by videos posted on Ukrainian and Russian social media and by some of the relatives of those captured.
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