Relatives of the dead and missing soldiers from the infamous unit 40463 of the 123rd Brigade of the ‘LPR’, in which soldiers are tortured, ‘neutralized,’ and disappear without a trace before even arriving there, have created a petition addressed to the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, Belousov.
They demand that Roman Shkrobu (“Kashtan”), commander of the 123rd Brigade, and Alexei Korchagin (“Cap”), commander of the 1st Motorized Rifle Battalion, must be removed from service. Earlier, ASTRA wrote that he may be involved in the torture of subordinates.
“We demand to conduct a global check in military unit 40463, where Russian servicemen have been disappearing en masse for a long time! We demand evacuation and familiarization with personal files about illegal transfer and demotion! To punish the deputy defense minister for sending the unprepared mobilized to the front line. We demand to hold a face-to-face meeting of the commander Shkroby R.I with the relatives of the missing servicemen!” the text says.
At the time of publication, the petition had been signed by more than 160 people. According to a member of the initiative group with whom ASTRA spoke, these are mostly relatives of the military from unit 40463.
“For a long time we have not been able to reach the Ministry of Defense by any available means. There are no responses from the Investigative Committee or the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, to the hundreds of appeals we have written. There is no global verification, the commanders are useless. The number of missing persons is only increasing every day,” Kristina Danilova, the wife of a military man, explained to ASTRA the creation of the petition.
Earlier, ASTRA said how the wife of a deceased military man from this unit found unsent messages on his phone where he talked about electrocution. The command “buried” him 4 days before his actual death, when the serviceman was still alive and asked for evacuation. ASTRA also wrote that relatives of one of the missing soldiers received his personal belongings and found an audio recording of beatings and torture in his phone, presumably using an army phone. Together with audio in the phone, relatives found a Telegram message in which the man who is shouting in the video writes that he is “with ‘Cap’ [Alexei Korchagin] and ‘Zolotoy’.”
