Putin’s Claim is False: Russia Sends Conscripts Directly Into Combat in Ukraine
“Military commanders, now is not the time to lie. You shouldn’t lie at all, but now it’s a crime,” Loseva wrote in her Telegram channel on October 13, 2022, lamenting the loss in combat of a 28-year-old friend. “Conscripted September 23. Sent to the front practically a few days later. Fell, heroically, on October 10,” Loseva wrote. Her post has since received over a million views.
“As of February 13, we were able to confirm information about 1,082 dead people [who had been] called up from civilian life. This is the most conservative estimate of the number of casualties among the mobilized, since we take into account only those cases where the death is publicly confirmed and when it is possible to establish the status of the combatant.”
This reality does not align with the Kremlin’s official story. Citizens are drafted under false pretenses; deployed without preparation, sufficient military gear or even first aid equipment; and given unclear instructions. As Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, told The Moscow Times in September 2022: “It is criminal to send untrained soldiers into combat… it’s murder.”
Hodges told Voice of America in February that Russia has substituted “sending bodies” to Ukraine and “trading bodies for time” for “an actual strategy for winning the war.”
The Kremlin continuously lowers the requirements for Russian military service in order to increase recruitment, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, DC based think tank, said on June 20.
The Russian government is notoriously untrustworthy in its reporting of battlefield casualties. In fact, the actual number of troops deployed in Ukraine may be beyond even the government’s ability to determine, the exiled Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta suggested in an October 2022 investigation into1.5 million missing military uniforms.
More recently, Novaya Gazeta reported on June 17 that Alla Fatkhelislamova received a court summons for discussing her son’s fate with reporters the previous month.
“Conscript Afanasy Podaev from the Tyumen region was killed in the Belgorod region where he was not originally meant to be stationed as part of his mandatory military training,” Novaya Gazeta reported.
A Russian court accused Podaev family members of “discrediting the Russian army” for discussing details of his death in an interview, Novaya Gazeta said.
A Siberian network 72.ru and Novaya Gazeta traced the complaint back to an individual who had submitted 764 complaints to that effect. That person, identified as Anna Korobkova, “spends two days by watching videos produced by media outlets designated as ‘foreign agents’ in Russia and then spends the next two days writing police complaints against the people who leave comments to the videos,” Novaya Gazeta reported.
The Russian authorities have gone to great lengths to eliminate a free flow of information on the battlefield deployment of conscripts. Still, evidence that conscripts are being used in direct combat continues to surface.
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