June 1-7: Deserters, crocodiles, prison torture, uncontrollable emotions
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Deserters and basement-dwellers
The newly-created military police will be able to enter houses. Supposedly, they are intended to tackle the serious problem of military desertion. According to Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, in January to March of this year, a total of 12,776 criminal cases were registered under the articles of the Criminal Code "Unauthorized Leave from a Military Unit or Place of Service" (Article 407) and "Desertion" (Article 408).
Keep in mind that many of them are armed and militarily trained, making it far harder to tackle them than draft dodgers. Add to that the fact that prisoners are now being mobilized. One of the reasons the military police is being created is that the army simply doesn’t have the manpower to divert personnel to retrieve deserters wandering around the rear, and ordinary police are hardly equipped to deal with such potent foes.
A video emerged on June 6 of 55 soldiers being kept in a basement by their superiors in the 81st Separate Airmobile Brigade. They claimed their officers were keeping them there because they were physically unfit for service in such a demanding type of unit.
They said they had not been paid their salaries since March, and their superiors were not allowing them to resign due to health reasons or transfer to another unit. The following video and an explanation of the situation was published by the son of one of those held, Ilya Yarema.
Mobilization - death and language
On June 6, the mayor of Chernivtsi Roman Klychuk criticized ‘mindless mobilization at the railway station…. this hunt for humans’ on his Facebook page because it is having the effect of scaring people away from using public transport. He also complained that this was decreasing the amount of visitors to the city.
The ministry of defense announced on June 6 that around 15% of eligible Ukrainian men have updated their details on reserv+, the app created recently to ‘streamline’ mobilization, so to speak. This is 1.412 million people, rising to 1.6 million on June 10. However, a million registered in the first week after the app was launched (before May 24), and the number of registrations has since petered out. Parliamentarian Kamelchuk noted that 70-80% of those who register on the app have medical reasons that allow them to avoid military service.
Many Ukrainian men have also downloaded the app only to terrifyingly find out that they are currently ‘being searched for’. The ministry of defense had to release a whole list of reasons why that might be the case.
Now is that the only form of digital utopia being created in Ukraine. Law enforcement can also track people’s location through diiya, the app almost all Ukrainians have to complete government documentations.
A court case was opened over the death of a 32 year old man in the mobilization office in the Zhytomyr region on June 5. The mobilization office responded, claiming that his death was due to alcoholism. This has been its standard response in various death cases.
Exam requirements have been harshened for those who want to do post-graduate work in Ukraine to stop draft-dodgers. The government has been worrying about the record number of men trying to enter post-graduate education as a way to avoid mobilization.
But perhaps there is still demand for linguists. On June 4, Ukraine’s language ombudsman called on mobilization officers to speak in Ukrainian to ‘strengthen defense capacities’. Clearly that’s the source of the problems.
Emotions and Crocodiles
On June 3, mobilization officers were filmed driving their bus into a draft dodger that tried to escape by bike. This was confirmed soon after by the mobilization office facebook page. They blamed it on the bike rider for swearing at the mobilization officers and trying to escape after being asked to show his documents. ‘The servicemen at work as mobilization officers are veterans of military action and were not able to control their emotions’.
Staff at military industrial factories whose personnel are supposedly totally reserved from mobilization complained on June 3 that they are still being mobilized. In turn, calls to mobilize women again emerged on June 2. This time from a commander in the 92nd batallion, Yury Fedorenko. ‘I sincerely believe that all Ukrainians should be subject to military service: men and women, from the age of 18. They should participate in combat operations after the age of 23.’
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