“No food, no water, they are breaking us”. Nearly 90 mobilized men held in children's camp for refusing to go to war — Astra

In a conversation with their relatives, the servicemen said their jailers were not giving them food or water and were trying to break them physically and psychologically.

“I don't know what will happen to us. There are 88 of us, we are going all the way. <...> They won't give us our IDs, they won't take us to the Rostov region. They're doing everything they can to get us to the front line”.

The woman who talked to Astra explained that her husband had been drafted on September 27, and that he and other draftees arrived in Yekaterinburg, at military camp #32, on the same day. On September 28, the mobilized men flew to Rostov-on-Don, and arrived in Makarovo in the evening. After three days of training the men were taken to Zmyiyvka to dig trenches, and on October 31 they were shot at near Ploshchanka and their car was bombed. For three days the mobilized men were lying in a field with only assault rifles and no possibility to shoot. Then the servicemen returned to Zmyiyvka on the orders of their commander, but the commander ordered them to go back to Ploshchanka. Most of the mobilized men refused and wrote explanatory reports, after which their weapons were confiscated, and the soldiers were brought to the Beryozka camp.

Now they are being threatened by officers of the military prosecutor's office and their commanders who are forcing them to sign three-year contracts. When the men tried to videotape their conversations with the commanders, one of the commanding officers noticed it and smashed the phone.

After the announcement of “partial” mobilization in Russia, dozens of videos have been posted on social networks, in which the mobilized men complain about the bad attitude of unit commanders, the lack of uniforms, payments, and even food. Soldiers do not want to go to war with rusty weapons from the 1970s and without proper training.