In May of 2022, the soldier did not report for duty because he stated that he “did not want to take part in a particular military operation.” On Thursday, officials informed the public that a Russian court had handed down a sentence of five years in prison to a 24-year-old professional soldier for refusing to fight in Ukraine.
According to the press department for the courts in the province of Bashkortostan in the southern Urals, the soldier “did not want to take part in a special military operation” and so did not report for duty in the month of May 2022.
According to the statement, law enforcement officials tracked down the individual, Marsel Kandarov, in September.
Separately, a military tribunal said that it had found Kandarov guilty of dodging military service during mobilization for a period of more than a month and had sentenced him to five years in prison.
At the end of September, Russia made public an announcement that it would be mobilizing a total of 300,000 men to bolster its forces already present in Ukraine.
The revelation caused a mass migration of men out of Russia, with many of them making their way to countries that border Russia, such as Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan.
Many of the troops who were mobilized allegedly had very little prior experience in fighting and had very little training before being dispatched to the front lines, which has led to criticism.
Separately, the Russian state news service TASS reported on Wednesday that a military tribunal in Moscow had sentenced a soldier to five years and six months in a penal colony for “beating” a commander during an argument.
According to TASS, the soldier voiced “his unhappiness” with the manner in which mobilized personnel were being trained outside of Moscow.
While he was talking, he puffed cigarette smoke in the face of a police officer, and the officer pushed him away in response. The soldier proceeded to strike the officer in the chest with his fist.
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A video of the incident was uploaded to the internet, and it showed the soldier cursing, expressing dissatisfaction with the training, and referring to the exercises as a “imitation.”