WORLD WORLDWIDE UK News Journal Update - (en) UK, ACG: Strike at a military airfield and other refusals to fight in Russia and Ukraine. Mid-autumn 2023 (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The following is a report by Ukrainian libertarian group Assembly about

many acts of resistance to war in Ukraine and Russia. ---- According to
the National Police of Ukraine, since the beginning of the full-scale
Russian invasion, about 8 thousand criminal proceedings have been opened
in the country for evading mobilisation. As of the middle of this month,
the list of leading regions looks like this: in Transcarpathian there
are 936, in Dnipropetrovsk - 669, Mykolayiv - 583, Lviv - 528, Volyn -
460, Vinnytsya - 460, Chernivtsi - 424, Kharkiv - 389, Rivne - 360,
Ternopil - 342, Sumy - 336. However, only 2015 men received suspicions,
of which the most were in the same Transcarpathian region - 322, Volyn
region - 193, Rivne - 166, Lviv - 156, Dnipropetrovsk - 146, Poltava -
116, Mykolayiv - 92, Ternopil and Kharkiv - 88 each, Zhitomir - 81,
Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernihiv - 70 each, Vinnytsya - 62. Of these, 1,877
indictments were sent to court, again in first place it turned out to be
Transcarpathia - 297, the top five also included the same Volyn - 171,
Rivne - 159, Lviv -141, Dnipropetrovsk - 138, Poltava - 108. If
blackouts begin again, enlistment officers and investigators will have
more work: clients who are now hiding in their homes will run charge
your phones at "points of invisibility", where they can be promptly
received.

Monitoring by the Assembly of the Ukrainian state register of court
decisions shows that if at the beginning of the year sentences under
Art. 336 of the Criminal Code (evasion of mobilisation) and Art. 408 of
the Criminal Code (desertion) in the Kharkiv region were rare and
separate, since the spring and summer they gradually began to be stamped
in batches, also tightening the punishment for failure to appear to a
unit: in the middle of summer the first draft dodger appeared in our
region, who was sentenced to a real prison term, but now this happens
regularly. These data are unlikely to differ much from the general
situation in the country. A typical example from local social networks
of how a summons to a unit can be issued looks like this: the day before
yesterday, on Kibalchich Street, cops probably forced a 56-year-old man
into a car and took him to the enlistment center, where he became fit
for duty in 20 minutes. The next day he already had to show up with his
things. Then such people join the ranks of refusers in the Armed Forces
of Ukraine, as our magazine told about earlier.

Since the beginning of August, the list of the first instance sentences
under Art. 336 has been added by 12, and by 6 cases under Art. 408.
During this time, the Leninsky District Court of Kharkiv set a record,
sending five evaders to jail, despite one of the convicts has a minor
child to support, another is a volunteer of the charity foundation Help
Save Kharkiv, and the third explained his act by his reluctance to leave
his elderly mother alone. There are no examples of suspended sentences
under this article for the specified period in our region: everyone is
given 3 years of actual imprisonment.

The Parliament of Ukraine is preparing for voting bill No. 10062 of
September 18, 2023 on the creation of a unified electronic register of
those liable for military service. According to it, the Ministry of
Defense will have access to information about such citizens from all
official databases, and the list of information that must be transferred
to the register by various authorities will also be expanded. This was
done taking into account the experience of Russia, where, together with
the electronic register, the practice of sending summonses online is
being introduced. There, the summons will be automatically considered
served within 7 days after being entered into the register; after
receiving notification of a ban on traveling abroad, the Russian
conscript will have to hand over his passport himself within 5 days. In
Ukraine, there is currently no such technical capability - the hindrance
is that the "mobilisation resource" base has not yet been digitised. One
way or another, everything is going to the fact that instead of a simple
kitchen grumbling about the authority, Ukrainian workers will have to
become real lifestyle anarchists. Not only to avoid official employment,
as now, but to strive to sever all ties with the state and live
clandestinely, including stopping seeking medical care, selling cars and
resetting bank cards being ready to blocking for failure to appear on a
summons. The ever-increasing blurring of the difference between the
occupation and "their own" will affect the political atmosphere of
Ukraine, where war fatigue and distrust of any government are already
beginning to dominate, especially in the front-line regions. Although
until a social explosion breaks out in Russia, of course, passive
protest will prevail: maximal going to underground, withdrawal of assets
abroad, flight from the country by any routes that are not yet blocked.

One of the main reasons for increasing mobilisation, Ukrainian
propaganda cites the fact that the Russian Federation monthly recruits
tens of thousands of contract soldiers into the army, but at the same
time, recruits are combined with those already serving. Contracts are
signed by mobilised, by mercenaries of the disbanded Wagner PMC, and
those who decided to renew the contract after expiration. At the same
time, instead of the ideological component, the Kremlin is increasingly
relying on money and hints to resume open mobilisation if it fails to
recruit enough contract soldiers.

However, hidden mobilisation among conscripts, convicts, debtors and
other forced categories is one of the factors disintegrating the army.
Based on the analysis of statistics from the judicial department of the
Supreme Court of the RF for the first half of 2023, compared to the
first half of 2022, the total number of convicted military personnel
increased by 40%. From January to June, 2,694 people were convicted, of
which 1,270 were convicted for crimes against military service, the rest
for other crimes, including murder, theft, drug possession, drunk
driving (this does not count the violence committed by ex-Wagnerists who
did not join the Russian Armed Forces). A year earlier, there were 1,918
convictions, of which 543 were for military crimes. Thus, the number of
sentences for military crimes has increased by almost two and a half
times. These crimes include failure to comply with order, desertion,
unauthorised leaving of service, feigning illness and voluntary surrender.

The Russian liberal-pacifist Telegram channel ASTRA counted on October
24 at least 173 Russian military personnel placed in illegal camps for
refusers in the occupied territories of Ukraine over the past 10 days.
In their opinion, this is just the tip of the iceberg - what they
managed to establish through appeals to the channel. Messages came
mainly from the Kupyansk direction on the Kharkiv-Lugansk borderland;
they are full of the same complaints about drunken commanders, lack of
ammunition, reconnaissance, artillery support, food and water. Some
people do not want to fight at all, others refuse precisely to go to the
slaughter. Most often, stories feature a torture basement in the village
of Zaytsevo, which began to fill up en masse last fall, then was
dispersed after publicity, and is now operating again. How many people
are sitting there at the moment is unknown.

A full overview of such incidents over the past month is available here
in Russian, let us limit ourselves to only the most bright and recent
case. According to ASTRA, about 150 mobilised and contract soldiers, who
had previously been taken from Zaitsevo and the same prison in
Rassypnoye 15 km away, were held at an army training ground in the Kursk
region. On the evening of October 24, they were taken to Voronezh,
threatening to send them to Rostov-on-Don, and from there to an assault
on Avdeevka near Donetsk, where Russian troops had been attacking for
two weeks. From the words of another informant, the number of detainees
could be even higher, because there were 11 Ural trucks in the convoy.
50 prisoners were taken out of Rassypnoye after a lawyer arrived
directly there. "At first I went to Zaitsevo, but there was no one in
Zaitsevo, and I found out that they were being held in Rassypnoye. I
drove up to the premises, it looked like a school building. I went
straight to the fence. A military man looked out from behind the fence.
I walked up, knocked, and showed my lawyer's ID. I told him: I know for
sure that my clients are here, I want to talk to them, he didn't even
look. He says "wait" and leaves. He came and said: "there's no one
here." I ask: what are you doing here with weapons then? He repeated
again: "there is no one here and leave here," he told ASTRA. "My husband
is mobilised, he refused to go on the offensive on Makeyevka. They were
placed in Zaitsevo. Then, apparently, there was a check and they were
driven around for 9 hours and returned back to the "LPR"[so-called
Lugansk People's Republic]. Today he managed to call from someone else's
number. They are near Kursk, waiting for a car to Rostov. As I
understand it, from there the plane will be in the direction of
Avdeevka. He said that they called the prosecutor's office, but they
were told: an order is an order. The local military police are
threatening the riot police that they will still go to the front, but
already beaten," the wife of one of the inmates told the same media.

The lawyer hired by the families was not allowed to see the protesters,
they were denied medical aid. A group of men who were taken to the
Voronezh airfield Baltimore, according to their relatives, "stood up and
said: call anyone, we won't go anywhere from here." This was already at
the very end of the day. More than 30 of those taken there refused to
board the plane to Rostov and waited for the military prosecutors. "They
give them the wrong weapon, no one knows why, they take everything, half
of it has already been sent on the plane. They were intimidated to such
an extent that people stopped standing their ground. Were sent without
documents. My husband is still waiting for the prosecutor, but it is
unknown how this will end," a relative of a military man told ASTRA. By
that time, some of the refusers had already been transferred to Rostov,
having taken away their belongings, including telephones and equipment
purchased with personal funds. At 23:46 Moscow time, those who refused
to board were taken back to Voronezh, but those who flew to Rostov had
to go to Avdeevka.

According to the latest data, 35 refusers from regiments 488, 283 and
254, who did not board the plane, were returned to Voronezh. As of
yesterday, October 25, they were at the Pogonovo training ground, where
two commanders of the 254th regiment were threatening them to return.
"We were told that we would be zeroed out, that is, they would shoot us.
Because we know a lot," one of them told ASTRA. He later added that
three of the soldiers are runaway from this base.

We continue to monitor the situation.

Recently, our journal has already told about the kidnapping of
Ukrainians trying to leave the country without permission and their
torture by the military for the purpose of mobilization.

In addition to this, you are welcome to take a look at our story about a
delivery service operator in Kharkiv being criminally prosecuted for
feeding people for free.

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2023/10/26/strike-at-a-military-airfield-and-other-refusals-to-fight-in-russia-and-ukraine-mid-autumn-2023/
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