Volunteer summary on mobilization in Russia for November 4–5

President Putin signed a law according to which an employer's mobilization will be the basis for terminating an employment contract.

A Transbaikalian attacked a military commissar, who came to hand over a death notice of his relative who was killed in the war. Yevgeny Gusev, mobilized from the Arkhangelsk region, died in a military training center near St. Petersburg. His sister revealed on social media that he suffered a massive heart attack after training at the training ground. Two mobilized soldiers from Rostov were killed: 22-year-old Viktor Kazakov and 23-year-old Sergei Filiptsev. Two residents of Belgorod had better luck – Konstantin Kolesnikov, born in 1989, and Denis Kleymenov, born in 1994, were taken prisoner.

In the Chelyabinsk region, the mobilized have been regularly killed in Ukraine since mid-October. Their relatives are trying to bring them back from the front: they believe that the guys are not trained enough to be on the front line. The father of one of the soldiers said that on October 3 the guys were sent to the Rostov region, and already on the 6th his son called and said: "That's it, we are digging in."

The wife of a mobilized soldier reported that her husband was sent to the front line without training, and after retreating from the front line, he was threatened with a military tribunal and forced to return to the front. “They lived for two weeks in leaky tents, cooked the food they were buying themselves, and were sent from the woods to Svatove without any training,” she said. In a Krasnodar military unit, mobile phones were taken away from the mobilized. It is assumed that this was done to avoid leakage of information about the terrible living conditions. The mobilized from the Stavropol Territory complain about the issued helmets – according to them, these helmets can be pierced through with a penknife.

A prison for Russian mobilized refuseniks was liquidated in Perevalsk, Luhansk region, following the publications of ASTRA and other media. Most of the illegally detained men were tricked into moving to another basement prison, the exact location of which is currently unknown. The detainees are still being forced to return to the front under threats of violence.

In Kazan, mobilized soldiers argued with a general about the conditions of service and threatened another officer. The soldiers complain that they received rusty rifles from the 70s, they do not have enough water, food or firewood, and they were not provided with laundry. The general in the video was the head of the military school, Major General Kirill Kulakov, he spoke to the dissatisfied servicemen twice. The second time he was joined by the Deputy Prime Minister of Tatarstan Rustam Nigmatullin. "At the moment, all the issues of the servicemen have been resolved, their claims have been withdrawn," the state-owned Tatar-inform news outlet reports.

In Crimea, the mobilized are kept in an overcrowded enclosed facility. Many of them have gotten sick. In the Belgorod region, the military police failed to cope with drunken mobilized soldiers. A train with conscripts arrived at the Chernyanka railway station, then the situation got out of control, because all 350 soldiers were intoxicated. The police detained Mikhail Zhikharev, a mobilized resident of Perm, who was criticizing other conscripts for drinking at the training center. He also complained to the Governor Dmitry Mahonin about the lack of payments during the governor's visit to the center.

The Russian Ministry of Defense keeps demonstrating footage of the mobilized being trained. This is how sniper training for the mobilized goes on in the Sverdlovsk region. Marine scouts of the Northern fleet conduct training of the mobilized. The mobilized undergo general combat training at training grounds in the Volgograd region. Training of the mobilized in the Moscow region has reached the final stage prior to sending to the “special military operation” zone. A concert of the State Russian Cossackdom Ensemble took place in the Volgograd region in order to raise the morale of the mobilized.

Retired women from Perm are pushed to buy socks for the mobilized. Local social media groups report that retired women in the Zaprud neighborhood were given out thread and told to knit “aid” for the soldiers. Thus, those, who don’t know how to knit, were obliged to buy and bring at least one pair of socks. Employees of a hospital in the Altai Republic (a region in southern Siberia, whose terrain encompasses the Altai Mountains) gathered humanitarian aid to support the mobilized fellow-countrymen. And the authorities of the Altai Republic will provide the children of the mobilized with cost-free meals (at school) and free passes for public transport. Residents of the Udmurt Republic (Udmurt people national region in Russia) gather clothes and gear for the mobilized stationed in Volsk.

Vladimir county court ruled, in response to a claim of a military prosecutor’s office, to block articles about escaping the mobilization on the Live Journal blog platform, on the Azerbaijan Media.az news portal, The Moscow Times news outlet and on the Ispovedi.com website.

Artist and sculptor Vladimir Likhodedov, who had never been on military duty, was mobilized on the second-to-last day of the mobilization in the Moscow region and was sent to a tent camp in Belarus without any preliminary medical examination.