Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 15 – Despite claims
by Russian officials that all is well with the draft in Russia and that in fact
fewer young men are seeking to avoid service than in the past, claims often
accompanied by pointing to the problems Ukraine is having filling the ranks,
the situation in the Russian Federation with regard to the draft is anything
but good, experts say.
Writing in “Sovershenno Sekretno”
this week, Aleksandr Kruglov says that some young Russians are worried about
going into the military because of the fighting in Ukraine and that many of
them are “thinking up ways to avoid service,” with some moving away from home
and not registering or bribing doctors to give them a deferment (sovsekretno.ru/articles/id/4393/).
According
to the defense ministry, three to six percent of those drafted have refused to
serve, with equally large percentages finding other ways to avoid the draft.
But “in fact,” Kruglov says, “those who do not want to serve in the army are
much more numerous,” and even more would avoid service if they had “the money
or connections” needed to do so.
“On
social networks,” Kruglov says, “ever more potential draftees are saying that
they are afraid of landing in the army lest they be sent to the zone of
military actions in Ukraine and will try to avoid service in the army at any
price.” He adds that it is “not accidental” that an Internet portal has
reappeared giving young men advice on how they can do so.
Valentina
Melnikova, the secretary of the Union of Soldiers Mothers Committees, agrees: “the
situation in Ukraine,” she says, “really can affect the desire of those called
to serve.” Many of them, she adds, are likely to try to get into alternative
service lest their failure to serve imposes restrictions on their future
careers.
Other
Russian experts say, the “Sovershenno sekretno” journalist continues, that the situation
with the Russian draft is “not as catastrophic as it was earlier” and note that
no one has challenged General Staff figures showing that “with each year the
number of draft avoiders has become less,” with the figure this time around 20
percent lower than a year ago.
But
those figures, other specialists say, do not mean there are no problems with
the draft. Aleksandr Perendzhiyev of the Association of Military Political
Analysts says that “all the problems of the Ukrainian armed forces may arise in
the Russian army as well if the military has to participating in operations of
such intensity.” To date, that has not been the case.
And
Melnikova says that in her view, the official figures understate the size of
the problem. On the one hand, officials count as successful draftees young men
who will be sent home by medical commissions. And on the other, all involved in
this process make declarations that no one can independently verify, opening the
way for falsification.
A major reason that the general staff can
plausibly report improvements in the work of the draft, Kruglov says, is that
there has been an active media campaign to present military service as a matter
of patriotism and efforts to focus public attention on efforts to improve the
lives of soldiers.
Conditions have
indeed improved, he continues. Soldiers can call home on a regular basis, food
has improved in many units, and the military is trying to move away from
reliance on the draft toward a professional army. And perhaps the most
important improvement: draftees are no longer being used as they were in the
past for non-military construction.
At the same
time, Kruglov says, Russian officials have increased the penalties for not
serving including restrictions on foreign travel, organized and publicized
trials of those who have sought to avoid service, and dismissed from government
service young people who are found to have escaped the draft through
questionable means.
There have been
experiments with allowing young men to study while serving, although these have
had more propaganda than military value, experts say, and the military has
reduced the length of service for contract soldiers, something that has reduced
the level and quality of preparation of the military.
But there is
near universal agreement that the Russian military has not been able to cure
itself of “dedovshchina,” the mistreatment of more recent draftees by those who
have been in service six months, 12 months or 18 months later. And experts say
that won’t happen until there is a real system in place that will protect
soldiers from this kind of abuse.
It is clear,
Kruglov concludes, that the current draft system has “exhausted itself,” and he
notes that the 154,000 young men scheduled to be drafted this term is in fact
only half as many as were drafted only five years ago, yet another reason why
the military can put out glowing figures of success even where there is little
basis for such claims.
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