generic Wives and mothers of mobilized Russians demanding their return at border with Ukraine – video
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According to the women, the units in which their relatives serve are suffering huge losses, yet the Russian military command is forbidding them from retreating under threat of summary execution.
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“They were scattered along the entire (contact) line from Kharkiv to Makiyivka areas,” one of the invaders’ wives said.
“(My husband) called the day before yesterday — they left the front line, hid in some village, but can’t get out because the checkpoints just don’t let them through. They are immediately threatened with being shot.”
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Her story in many ways echoes what relatives of other conscripts are saying. The soldiers, armed only with assault rifles, are constantly under artillery fire and are unable to resist the Ukrainian military.
At the same time, they have only one mobile phone per 150 people, and each can talk to their relatives for only a minute or a minute and a half.
“He called and said: ‘I’m alive. Still alive.’ I asked him: ‘When did you eat or drink?’ He said: ‘The last time we drank water three days ago,’” the woman recalled.
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Another wife of one of the drafted soldiers complained that attempts to reach someone in a position of authority in Russia has not yielded any results. She stressed that any requests to allow soldiers to leave the war zone only complicate things, since “those for whom such applications are submitted will immediately be declared deserters.”
According to another woman, seven people from a company sent to the front line immediately returned to their base after arriving in Luhansk Oblast.
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“After that, the company commander tied their hands, painted crosses (on their foreheads) with green paint and began to beat them, calling them deserters,” she told the BBC.
“Later he took these seven men away, and no one has seen them again.”
The woman added that all the mobilized are used as cannon fodder to provoke the Armed Forces of Ukraine to attack them, thus revealing the firing positions of the Ukrainian military.
Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
