The parents of another soldier complain to the same office that their son, along with other conscripts, was unexpectedly sent to war by the army from military service, other people point to beatings in the army. The investigative portal The Insider wrote about it, which gained access to the archive of complaints of the Russian military prosecutor’s office.
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“In mid-January, I went by ship for a (military) exercise in Syria, but instead they fraudulently sent us to Ukraine without asking me about my wish to participate in a special military operation. From the first days, my brigade was in the front line, in a firing position,” says the twenty-one-year-old soldier in the complaint, who is trying in vain to end his service in the fighting in Ukraine. “My commander refuses to take the report. I sent my request to the command of the Baltic Fleet. What should I do in this situation?” asks the young man.
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The mother of another soldier reports that her son was sent instead for military training to the war as a contract soldier, even though the son did not sign any contract. “When he went by train for an alleged exercise, they were given a package of non-perishable food, one for two soldiers, there was no water on the train, they had to buy it. I understand that it is the army, but they don’t have to treat our children like dogs,” writes the mother.
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“They told my son that he and other enlisted men had been specially selected to participate in a military special operation. When they objected that President Vladimir Putin’s decree states that conscripts may not be sent to war, they were told to watch more (news) on TV and that they would be sent there anyway,” another mother described. Relatives of another conscript complain that the commanders are trying to force the soldiers to sign the contract by beating them.
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Other people describe that the Russian army does not help loved ones with the repatriation of the remains of the fallen. “According to friends… they couldn’t pull out the body, he was left in a burning vehicle in Ukraine. At least return the remains so we can bury him as a human,” writes the dead soldier’s mother.
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Residents of the territory in eastern Ukraine, which was controlled by pro-Russian separatists, then send complaints to the prosecutor’s office about looting by Russian soldiers. “My parents lived in the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic for eight years, and during that time they had not seen such atrocities. Did they come to protect us, or to rob and kill?” reads one of the complaints. It is the need to protect the residents of the internationally unrecognized separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics that Moscow explains, among other things, about the invasion of Ukraine.
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