Draftees who suffered missile attacks in Makiivka ask Putin to send them home ‘due to outrageous treatment’ from commanders

Russia’s mobilised soldiers from the 1444th Regiment of the Samara Region who suffered a missile attack in Makiivka on New Year’s night have asked Vladimir Putin to send them home due to being “outrageously treated” by commanders. The appeal to Putin was published on VK.

The 1444 regiment consists of residents of Russia’s Samara region who were mobilised in September 2022. It has been stationed near Makiivka in Ukraine’s Donetsk region since 20 December. The building where the 1st battalion of the regiment had been stationed was attacked by a missile on New Year’s night. The draftees from the 2nd and 3rd battalions who recorded the appeal were in a different place.

After the incident, around 1,500-2,000 draftees were taken to Krasnopillia, and then to Russia’s Rostov and Kursk regions. There, “odd individuals wearing uniforms” assigned them to the 20th Army, 362nd Regiment, 3rd Division, while the 1444th Regiment was disbanded, the servicemen reported in the video.

They also say records about their movements and participation in hostilities are not added to their files. This means that they will not be able to receive their payments in the future.

The draftees say they have been spending their own money to buy meals and clothing and also did not receive any equipment. They brought an UAZ Patriot SUV with them which was seized from them as “the commander of the regiment has no vehicle to drive,” the servicemen said in the video.

“We ask the President and the Defence Minister to turn their attention to our situation and do something so that we are not treated with such negligence. We are being treated like objects, handed over from one place to another. They move us around between locations without any explanation. If the 1444 regiment is indeed disbanded, then let us return to the Samara region and take further action,” they said.

In their appeal, the draftees also called on the prosecutor’s office to pay attention to cases of negligence of the higher command.

The surviving draftees of the Makiivka strike from the 1st Battalion, 1444 Regiment also recorded a video appeal previously. In it, they announced that their unit was going to be formally disbanded.

They said their unit had arrived at an unnamed tent camp on 5 February where nobody was expecting them, and the entire personnel was going to be disbanded. The draftees requested to remain serving together as they had gone through “some tough situations” that brought them closer. However, the command refused to grant the request and dismissed the entire officer corps.

Tatyana Plotnikova, a volunteer who posted the video, believes that the disbandment may indicate that Russia’s military leadership wants to hush up the incident in Makiivka.

“Or maybe they are being shuffled so that everyone forgets the details of the Makiivka incident sooner?” Plotnikova wrote.

The official reports by Russia’s Defence Ministry say that on the night of 1 January 2023, 89 Russian servicemen were killed by shelling in Makiivka. The Defence Ministry did not specify whether the deceased were draftees and which units they were assigned to. At the same time, the Samara governor said that residents of his region were among the dead, but the regional draft board refused to publish the lists of the deceased.

The Ukrainian side stated that about 400 people were killed and 300 were injured.