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War
1578th day. Raids in the Penza region. Human rights activists talk about dozens of people detained (and already sent to war). The authorities claim that there are no raids, and all videos about them are staged
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Russia
During mass raids carried out by military registration and enlistment offices in Penza and other cities in the region, dozens of men were detained, Ivan Chuvilyaev, a representative of the Walk Through the Forest project, told Meduza.
The telegram channel “Go Through the Woods” states that as of the evening of June 19, human rights activists had received 16 complaints about the detention of men in the Penza region, who were forced to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense and be sent to war.
According to Chuvilyaev, local authorities tried to force “at least a hundred” people to sign the contract. “How many people were swindled into a contract, how many are still in the police custody - unfortunately, we will only find out all this after a while, when relatives come to us: to cry that a loved one was sent to the front,” he said in an interview with Meduza.
Evidence of joint raids by security forces and military commissars in Penza and neighboring cities began to appear on June 17-18. Human rights activists say that the police primarily detain people from socially vulnerable groups - those who have problems with the law or money. For example, these are men with outstanding convictions and debts, or those who have been caught for a minor offense (for example, being intoxicated in a public place). The detainees were taken to the police or military registration and enlistment office. There they were required to sign a military contract. According to unconfirmed reports, violence was used against some of the detainees.
The Walk Through the Woods project reported that in a number of cases, men were able to be released without consequences when their relatives and lawyers intervened. However, others were actually sent to war.
The day before, a video filmed near the military registration and enlistment office of the Oktyabrsky and Zheleznodorozhny districts of Penza was widely circulated on social networks. In it, women block the path of a minibus in which their relatives are sitting under military escort. In total, there were 18 detained men on the bus, the Agency found out . Mediazona spoke with one of the participants in the video. She said that the detained men were beaten at the military registration and enlistment office and forced to sign contracts. Her husband has already been taken to a military unit in annexed Mariupol.
Another woman said in an interview with Sever.Realii that her son was detained without documents and sent to war. “In an hour, he received all the documents - from his passport to his military ID. The real documents were left at home, and he is now being sent to Ukraine. He managed to get through and quietly said: “They are taking me to Ukraine.” You could hear that he had already resigned himself. I shouted: “Why did you sign?” He replied: “I had to.” I'm sure he was beaten. He had no intention of going to war,” she said .
Massive raids by security forces are also taking place in the cities of Kamenka, Zarechny and Kuznetsk, neighboring Penza. According to a local human rights activist, they began at the end of May, and individual cases have been recorded since April.
“In June, all this reached some kind of prohibitive level. Back at the end of May, dozens of wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of detainees contacted me every day. Now the count is already hundreds of messages. I simply don’t have time to sort through all the complaints and delve into every story,” the human rights activist told Sever.Realii.
Another video documenting the raids was filmed in Kuznetsk. It shows a man in a wheelchair swearing at military patrol officers conducting arrests. “What will you tell the mothers then? They take young boys. If there is no one to intercede, I will intercede, without legs I will intercede,” he shouts. When one of the military men starts filming the man, he follows him in a wheelchair with a knife in his hand.
Important Stories revealed the identity of the man in the wheelchair. He turned out to be a former participant in the war in Ukraine. He was also convicted five times for beatings and thefts, the last time in January 2026.
Authorities in the Penza region deny that they are conducting mass roundups of men with the aim of sending them to war. The governor’s press service stated that all the videos that are being distributed on social networks are staged and this is “a large-scale provocation of the TsIPSO .”
The same thing was said by the military commissar of the Penza region Andrei Surkov. “If you watched the video well, there are men who were taken, imprisoned, who were sent away, they are sitting and smiling at this comedy that you performed there,” he said in a conversation with Mediazona.
Surkov added that he knew “the names of [those] who made this staged video,” and accused the authors of the video of trying to compromise the army and committing sabotage against the Russian authorities.
Representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Penza region called the raids “planned events.” “During the monitoring of the Internet, publications were revealed that the police, together with employees of other departments, allegedly conduct mass raids in the city of Penza, detain men and force them to sign contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense. The information contained in these publications is untrue,” the police statement said .
The security forces claim that they simply assisted the Investigative Committee “in carrying out raids to identify persons who received Russian citizenship and did not register with the military in a timely manner.” “These raids are planned and are periodically carried out in the region,” the Ministry of Internal Affairs added.
There has been no information about mass raids in other regions of Russia. In Ukraine, in recent years, there has been a widespread practice of TCC employees (analogous to military registration and enlistment offices) forcibly detaining those liable for military service in public places. It was called "busification".
War in photographs. Kharkov
On the night of June 20, Russian troops attacked the Kholodnogorsk district of Kharkov with air bombs. According to local authorities, a two-story residential building was damaged. Nine people were injured, including a six-year-old child. The body of a deceased local resident was pulled out from under the rubble.
War through the eyes of Meduza readers
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Lisa (Moscow region). War... At the beginning, like everyone else, it seemed to me that this did not concern me.
I’m 24, last month my stepfather died in the war, my younger brother was left without his only friend, support, and most importantly, his father. My younger brother’s tears are a colossal pain, he so dreamed that dad would come back and in the summer they would go fishing with a boat, but what now? Another traumatized person... I will try to be my brother's support, but it won't change anything.
All week I wake up to the sounds of air defense, we live in constant stress, sales of antidepressants are in the top 1.
Only for four years now I have not been able to understand and answer the question: why did everyone start this, why? Why do we need foreign territories if we have slums and ghettos further than the Moscow Ring Road?
Can we change something? I don’t think we are so tired and so intimidated that we simply no longer have the power of our opinions and words. There’s emptiness inside, there’s not even hope anymore... And it’s so funny that people really wanted to change something, voting for Boris Nadezhdin, for example, standing in huge queues - there was no point.
Everything has been bought and we are just pawns.