“Center for Maintaining Combat Readiness”
A penal camp designed to break the will of Russian conscientious objectors
Demobilized Russians who disobeyed wartime orders were held in a former prison camp in Luhansk. Conditions there are disastrous. You can come out only by turning the front.
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Russia mobilized 300,000 citizens. 87,000 people are already on the front line in Ukraine. But those who disobey the order will be locked up.
If you don’t want to fight, you will be forced to. This seems to be the goal of the commanders of the Russian troops. There is no due process for conscientious objection to those mobilized; Instead, the players are imprisoned. Their “combat readiness” must be restored behind bars – with violence and humiliation.
In the former penal camp in the Ukrainian city of Perevalsk in the Luhansk region, before partial demobilization, soldiers who did not want to participate in the war despite being under the contract were illegally detained. Now the former penal colony, which activists have called inhumane, is back in action. Now the mobilized citizens who don’t want to fight are locked up there. To re-strengthen their morale in the name of “Centre for Maintaining Combat Readiness”. Because there slogan: fight or jail. This was reported by the opposition Russian news website Mediazona.
Men live in small cabins. Mold spreads on the ceiling, there is no space between the beds, and the windows are barred. There is a bucket instead of a toilet. Such videos are made on Telegram channel Astra Round. “That’s how we sleep, that’s how we eat in this room. Everything is wet, everything is dripping,” says the soldier in the video. Entries are said to be available from early October.
Soldiers face an ultimatum – war or prison
Another showed up on October 2 Video The same soldiers, sitting in a cellar. In the video, the man talked about the fact that those who defy orders are locked up here. The soldiers left as they found themselves in a hopeless situation. “Our forwards were asked to go, but we said no,” says one player. Now they don’t know what will happen.
According to Astra, these men were shortly afterwards taken to Perevals. A soldier’s friend told Astra: “After ten days in the cell, the prosecutors came and gave an ultimatum: front or ten years in prison.” For many felons, re-employment is a nightmare. Hastily mobilized Russian troops are generally ill-equipped and poorly trained, and are often sent into battle by their commanders as cannon fodder.
The mobilized are drawn back to the front
To prevent them from escaping the camp, Wagner’s mercenaries must keep watch. Former contract soldiers who were imprisoned in Bervalsk before demobilization, but were later allowed to return home, describe how dangerous conditions in the camp were. No hygiene products, no bed linen, only one meal a day. He who does not want to go forward will be beaten to the core.
According to Mediazona, some men from Perevalsk are said to be fighting at the front again. But not voluntarily – they were forced to do so by force.
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