Mobilized and contract soldiers from military unit №98592 in Stavropol city were waiting for inspections and military medical examination after writing reports with refusals to participate in the war. Early in the morning on May 31, men were informed that they would be taken for interrogation to the military commandant’s office in Rostov-on-Don. Under this pretext, they were taken to the Donetsk People’s Republic and sent into battle. The relatives of the servicemen told ASTRA about this.
“My husband has a psychiatric illness, he got it after a concussion. He was not taken for treatment anywhere. Although we had a referral to the hospital, we were told that “there are no places“. He had to go to a civilian hospital. The diagnosis of personality disorder was confirmed. My husband gets lost in space, his memory is short-lived, he is dangerous both for himself and for others. He is on medication now, but he should run out of them today,” Oksana, the wife of the mobilized from Stavropol, told ASTRA (name changed).
Together with Oksana’s husband, several more soldiers were taken out of Stavropol by bus. Their relatives claim that some of them have been diagnosed with cancer and tuberculosis. Another one has a “rotting leg after an injury“. The servicemen were brought from Stavropol to Krasnodar, then to Rostov.
There, in Rostov, they met with another ASTRA person, Alexey Motorny, a volunteer from the Rostov region with a stent in his heart after a heart attack. ASTRA published a video of how Alexey was beaten during his arrest.
From Rostov, men were all taken together to a military training ground near Ilovaisk. On June 3, one of them managed to call his family. ASTRA, with the permission of relatives, publishes an excerpt from the conversation.
“They didn’t even let me sleep at night, nothing. They loaded us into a minibus and took it to some even bigger shithole, even farther. [They said] to run through the fields, through the forest belt. In short, we didn’t make it, because of my leg, of the second man, the third one. We couldn’t make it so we were told “F*ck you, die here yourself. No one will come back for you”. We spent the night in a trench with corpses,” the man says in a conversation with his family.
“They illegally removed them, the investigation has not yet begun on them, they all need to be treated,” relatives of the servicemen told ASTRA. They demand that the men be returned to Russia.
In Russia, cases of sending “refuseniks” (those who refuse to serve) to the frontline have become more frequent. ASTRA reported about a miner from Lugansk, who was on the same bus as Alexey Motorny. Also this week, dozens of wounded soldiers were threatened to be sent to the frontline. They were forcibly detained in Yekaterinburg and Yakutsk. In addition, the editorial board is aware that a few days ago refuseniks were suddenly loaded onto a bus to be sent to the frontline in the Orenburg region. Earlier, a similar situation occurred in the Primorsky region, where a mobilized man who refused to fight was handcuffed, put on a plane to Ukraine and deployed.
