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Aug 26 34 tweets 6 min read Read on X
1/ Over 600,000 Russians are estimated to have left their country since 2022 in the biggest exodus since the post-Soviet period. Many have left to avoid being mobilised to fight. One man managed to escape into exile after deserting the Russian Army twice. ⬇️ Image
2/ Govorit NeMoskva tells the story of Alexander, a 46-year-old who was the chief engineer of a large construction company. When mobilisation was announced in September 2022, he believed that he would be protected by his company. He soon found this was not the case.
3/ "It turns out they got me ripped off. I worked for companies whose owners were well-known and very rich people. They most likely received orders to [send employees] to war." Even though he had no previous military experience, he was immediately mobilised.
4/ "I wasn't the only one who was such a sucker - there were about 30 percent of people like me: aged 38 to 45, with families, so to speak, from the middle class. From all over Russia, younger people were being called up.
5/ "We tried to fight: we contacted the prosecutor's office, filed lawsuits, challenging the decision to mobilise. But in response we received evasive formal replies, and complaints were kicked around from one authority to another."
6/ He received minimal combat training, going to "a shooting range to shoot rusty cartridges from unusable weapons". In November 2022, he was sent to Svatove in the occupied Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine.
7/ "They dumped us in the forest: it was late autumn, freezing rain with snow was falling, and we had no tents, no entrenching tools, not even basic axes and saws to at least chop some sticks in the forest and make shacks. On the third day we ran out of food and water.
8/ "And they began to slowly break up the battalion: we had managed to become friends over the month, and there was discontent that we were being used like some sort of cattle — so they began to throw us into battle in groups.
9/ "The first time they took away 65 people, three days later only 14 people came back alive, the second time they took away the whole company, 120 people – 10 of them were left, I think. People were just taken away in lorries at night and dropped off in forest belts.
10/ No one gave them any task, they started to be shelled - there was panic, they ran away and, of course, all of them were killed almost immediately."

The men saw little of the career officers who commanded them, but stayed well behind the front lines out of harm's way.
11/ The junior officers at Alexander's headquarters were all mobilised men. "They were more or less able to maintain discipline in normal ways, not army ways, because they worked as civilian managers. And the career officers... Cowardly, petty, corrupt."
12/ Alexander says as a person of religious, pacifist beliefs, he consistently sought to avoid fighting. He deserted from the army after seeing Russian helicopters mowing down soldiers fleeing from the front line.
13/ "I had no intention of taking part in military actions from the very beginning, and when I saw with my own eyes how those who were fleeing the battlefield were shot from helicopters, [I deserted]."
14/ He was sent to the infamous Russian detention centre in Zaitseve, where the local House of Culture has been turned into a torture facility for 'rehabilitating' soldiers who refuse to fight (see thread below).
15/ "I reached the border, but the border guards caught me and took me to the famous Zaitseve — I spent two weeks in a basement there. The basement was set up like this: it was divided into two parts.
16/ "In one part were those who had done something serious — for example, shot someone while drunk, or just convinced refusers. They were beaten there. I was sitting in the other, “normal” part — there were just bare boards, they fed us twice a day, and didn’t let us smoke.
17/ "And zero information about what was happening. They didn’t touch us, but the screams from the other half were so loud that it was impossible to sleep. Then they told us to go there and clean up: wash off the blood and all that."
18/ After being sent back to the front line, Alexander realised that he could not declare himself a pacifist. Otherwise, "they would have put me in a pit or a basement in Zaitseve, and if I had not re-educated myself, they would have “zeroed” me, that is, shot me."
19/ Alexander has coronary heart disease and suffered a heart attack, a broken leg and a severe concussion, presumably during a Ukrainian attack. The head of his battalion's medical unit gave him papers to cross the border and go back to Russia legitimately.
20/ "I was evacuated unofficially, through the hospital, and our military unit was disbanded very soon - so as not to pay insurance payments for death or injury and not to spoil the statistics of the generals.
21/ "Because after the disbandment of the unit, people are not listed anywhere in the documents, and the remnants of the survivors are assigned to another unit after a month or two.
22/ "For example, one of my comrades was wounded, and when applying for insurance payments, they told him: "How did you get wounded, being in a training unit deep in the rear?"
23/ "By the New Year - 2023 - our battalion was worn out by half, in just a month. And by April, out of 550 people, there were about 150 left."
24/ Alexander was dropped off across the border in the Belgorod region but was left to seek his own medical treatment. He hired a taxi with several other wounded soldiers and went to Moscow. However, he decided not to return to the army and remained in hiding for a year.
25/ The army caught up with him in February 2024 and took him to an army prison. "There were always 30-40 people there. Once a week a plane would fly out and pick up those who agreed to go to war. They set conditions: either you go to a real prison or you go to war.
26/ "But you still go to war after the trial. That is, they get you on a hook: you are put on trial, and at the trial you ask, please, I won’t do this anymore, I want to fight. And the judge gives you a suspended sentence instead of a real one.
27/ "And you can't get away from this hook, because if you escape, your suspended sentence will turn into a real one, plus they'll add on time for escaping. And you'll immediately go to jail for ten years. I spent three months there.
28/ "They tried to put me on board three times and send me to war. I refused, demanded that they conduct a VVK [military medical commission]. They conducted it, and it turned out that I was miraculously cured.
29/ "They do it like this: if your index finger moves, you can pull the trigger - you're fit! I myself witnessed how they declared a man with a half-torn-off foot to be fit. Because there were huge losses, there weren't enough people."
30/ Alexander was determined not to go back to war and remained in prison. Instead, he and his fellow detainees were conscripted illegally to help build a holiday home for the regimental commander. He took the opportunity to escape.
31/ "I once overheard a major who was driving us to the construction site say: we'll do it anyway, so you'll go to war. I took this into account, because I was already mentally prepared to go to prison for a few years — but not to got to war, to kill people.
32/ Friends transferred money to me. I climbed over the fence — and went. Then I got on a plane and flew to St. Petersburg."

Due to "the usual sloppiness" he was not detected and was able to take a minibus to Minsk. He flew from there to Tashkent in Uzbekistan.
33/ However, he was unable to stay for more than a couple of months due to the Uzbek government starting to send Russian fugitives back across the border. He fled again to Georgia, where he now works part-time at a construction site with Ukrainians who had fled from Russia. /end

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More from @ChrisO_wiki

Aug 26
1/ One interesting aspect of the charges against Pavel Durov is the role that's likely to be played by Article 323-3-2 of France's Criminal Code, which only went into force in February 2024. Elon Musk could well be vulnerable under the same article. ⬇️

Image
2/ Article 323-3-2 creates liability for "a person whose activity consists of providing an online platform service" who is "knowingly allowing the transfer of products, content or services whose transfer, offer, acquisition or possession is manifestly illicit".
3/ If they are found guilty, this is punishable by five years of imprisonment and a fine of 150,000 ($167,000) euros. If they carry out this offence as part of a 'criminal gang', they can be imprisoned for 10 years and fined 500,000 euros ($557,000).
Read 18 tweets
Aug 25
1/ A group of Russian junior commanders have today published an appeal to the military authorities about the use of violence and extortion by their battalion commander and his deputy, as well as the theft of money from the salary cards of dead soldiers. ⬇️
2/ In a video publicised by the human rights organisation , four soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of the 506th Motorised Rifle Regiment accuse their battalion commander, Lt Col Sergei Voskoboev and his deputy, Alexander Smolyakov, of abuse of authority.Gulagu.net
3/ The men state that on the night of 24-24 August 2024, three contract soldiers (named as Samir Isaev, Marat Tulebeev, and Andrei Andrianov) were brutally beaten, and money was also extorted from Captain Pavel Malyshev and Alexei Kolupaev. Their video shows the men's injuries.
Read 9 tweets
Aug 25
1/ Indonesian mercenaries are reported to have joined the Armenian Battalion (ArBat) of the Russian Armed Forces to fight in the Kursk region. The battalion, part of the "Pyatnashka" international brigade, has published a brief video of its first Indonesian contract soldiers. ⬇️
2/ The ArBat's Telegram channel says that it has recruited "a number of local residents who are ready to go to the Donetsk People's Republic, undergo training with our instructors and fight against Ukrainian neo-Nazism with weapons in hand." It is reportedly fighting in Kursk.
3/ The battalion was founded by Armen "Gorlovsky" Sarkisyan (or Sargsyan), a crime boss from the Donetsk region who organised groups of titushki (thugs) who violently opposed Ukraine's 2014 revolution. He has been on the Interpol wanted list since 2014. Image
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Aug 25
1/ French football may have played a role in the arrest yesterday of Telegram head Pavel Durov. There has reportedly been a sharp increase in pirate streaming of French football matches on Telegram, which the company has been very slow to deal with. ⬇️ Image
2/ RTL reports that hundreds of thousands of French football fans are watching illegal streams due to the high cost of the officially endorsed DAZN streaming platform. On 16 August, more than 200,000 people used illegal Telegram streams to watch Paris Saint-Germain beat Le Havre.
3/ The broadcasters work with anti-piracy firms such as LeakID and Athletia to detect and report illegal content. However, Telegram reportedly shows "little enthusiasm for cooperating and removing streams in a timely manner."
Read 10 tweets
Aug 24
1/ More incidents of looting of Russian villages by Russian soldiers have been recorded on camera. Shops, warehouses and private homes in the Kursk region have been among the properties in evacuated villages that have been ransacked by their ostensible defenders. ⬇️ Image
2/ Law and order was previously reported to have broken down completely in towns and villages near the front line of the Ukrainian incursion in the Kursk region. There's been substantial evidence of widespread looting.
3/ According to the Kursk regional Telegram channel 'Nene' ('Ash'), a mobile phone store in the village of Glushkovo was looted on 17 August, while in the nearby village of Zvannoye, a Wildberries (Russian equivalent of Amazon) warehouse was looted twice in the same day.

Read 7 tweets
Aug 22
1/ So many Russian soldiers have been killed in the Irkutsk region that the local authorities have run out of money to transport them back to their relatives. Local people are now having to crowd-fund for body bags and the transportation of corpses. ⬇️ Image
2/ Russia's Ministry of Defence transports the bodies of dead soldiers free of charge to airfields capable of handling military transport planes. However, these may be hundreds of kilometers from where the relatives live, necessitating the use of ground transportation as well.
3/ The responsibility for doing this originally lay with regional authorities but was transferred to municipalities earlier in 2024. The cost was covered in the Irkutsk region by the 'Zvezvda' fund, but this has passed to municipal educational funds – which have run out of money.
Read 8 tweets

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