How many are there? Where are they driving?

Several dozen contractors from the Maykop intelligence brigade left the training ground in the Rostov region to avoid sending to Ukraine, and became involved in criminal cases. According to Gazeta.ru following the results of her own investigation, we are talking about military personnel of military unit No. 22179 of the 33rd separate motorized rifle brigade.

Criminal cases were instituted against contractors under Art. 337 of the Criminal Code (unauthorized abandonment of the part) and Art. 338 Criminal Code (desertion). Sanctions for these articles are, respectively, up to five and up to ten years in prison. Some of the defendants have already received deadlines. Gazeta.ru publishes the names of some contractors already convicted of desertion or under investigation, as well as one of the decisions on the initiation of a criminal case.

According to investigators, last fall, contractors left the Kadamovsky training ground near Novocherkassky, "not wanting to endure the hardships and deprivations of military service." Soldiers talk about unbearable conditions at the landfill - a lack of drinking water, cold, lack of conditions for sleeping. At the same time, they were offered to go volunteers to Donbass, promising 8 thousand rubles a day. The agitators, according to the soldiers, were "without insignia, but with epaulets from major and above."

According to the official statistics of the Maykop garrison court, in the first six months of 2015, under Article 337 of the Criminal Code, 62 military personnel were convicted - this is almost twice as much as in the previous five years. “The unit commander is reported, says: the military -investigation department can’t cope, so many criminal cases,” lawyer Tatyana Chernetskaya told the publication, representing the interests of five contractors. “The guys are assigned numbers 101, 137 in the line for criminal cases, receive a number and wait for the investigator.”

In the video secretly taken by relatives of contractors, the acting commander of the unit, Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Kens, states that about 80 people refused to fight in Ukraine, and calls the shoots from the landfill "disgrace".

At least one of the refuseniks - Sergeant Pavel Tyntchenko - at the court on the choice of a preventive measure announced ideological motives. "I did not follow a criminal order, because I did not want to go against the oath that I accepted and did not want to participate in the hostilities in Ukraine," the sergeant’s statement published in Gazeta.ru said.

The Ministry of Defense denied information about the mass criminal prosecution of Maykop contractors. The report of the agency , which gives the “Echo of Moscow”, says that investigative actions under the article “Samoving Leaving the military unit” are carried out only in relation to four military personnel: Kudrina A.N., Shevkunova I.N., Tynchenko P.P. and Enenko A.V. All of them are mentioned in the publication of Gazeta.ru, and Anatoly Kudrin, according to the publication, has already been convicted. The command of the Southern Military District claims that these four "systematically for a long time made disciplinary offenses related to the service."

Earlier, the Ministry of Defense has repeatedly stated that there are no Russian troops in Ukraine, and reports about the recruiting of volunteers in military units are unreliable. Meanwhile, in February of this year, the Presidential Council for Human Rights published information about Murmansk contractors who refused to go to the Donbass and reconnected with the command.