Russian soldiers are complaining about their commanders with an alarmingly increasing regularity.
Allegedly, they are being forced into battle without the necessary training, they are being used as cannon fodder,
and they are dying in droves.
We’ve seen the addresses recorded by the mobilized recruits from Irkutsk, Belgorod, and the Russian Far East.
Twenty professional soldiers from the 126th Black Sea Coastal Guard brigade refused to go to Ukraine.
According to their statement, they are conscientious objectors.
Dear Vladimir Putin, we are the mobilized soldiers from Mordovia region.
We are mobilized soldiers from Kaliningrad, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk regions.
We are mobilized from Omsk. We are from Serpukhov. We are from Tumen region. We are from Stavropol.
We are addressing the Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin,
Dear Vladimir Putin, we haven't had any classes, we did not have any specialized training.
We are cannon fodder, we are being sent to the frontline without us having any skills.
The commanders are nowhere near us.
Their motto is to fight to the last soldier standing since they would be sent new ones.
We do not see any way out of that situation, the commanders do not value our lives.
We are people being sent to the frontline to defent Motherland, and we are being used as cannon fodder.
Russians are coming to a realization that they are being dragged into an unjust war where they are the aggressor.
What can they do about it? Should they dodge the draft? Should they the battlefield if already there?
How ethical is desertion? What is the difference between convictions and treason? Let’s discuss all that.
BE GRIT, NOT GREASE
In 1995, Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, Germany, saw the unveiling of the Monument
to the Unknown Wehrmacht’s Deserter.
Germans have immortalized people once considered to be criminals.
They were executed in Nazi Germany, whereas in the democratic one, they are the symbol of resistance.
The quote on the plaque reads, “Be grit, not grease in the gears of the world” (poet Günter Eich).
30,000 people who refused to serve in the army were court-martialed and executed during the Nazi reign.
An additional 100,000 draft dodgers and deserters were sent to concentration camps or penal units.
Around 4,000, tops, made it out alive.
There are less than a hundred of them left today. You can meet them in Berlin, the “last ones standing.”
The headquarters of the Draft Dodgers and Deserters Union is located there.
Conscientious objectors have been persecuted for centuries.
The first record of that dates back to the year 295, to the Roman Empire.
Maximillian, aged 21, was supposed to become a legionnaire but refused it.
He was a Christian, and his creed prevented him from murder. The pacifist was beheaded. He was later canonized as a saint.
The story is very different nowadays.
Today, conscientious objection is being protected by the UN.
There is no official document, however, that would spell out the right to refuse to take part in combat action.
It can be inferred from Article 18 of the UN covering the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.
Governments of many countries call that article a very ambiguous one.
It results in governments, being the providers of violence, trying to conscript their citizens,
whilst human rights activists are pushing against that. It is an ongoing battle.
INTREPID FOUR
In addition to the judicial system, police, military enlistment offices, and other enforcement agencies,
the government is using public opinion.
“Only the army will help you man up” or “The army is the best university” would be good examples of that.
Boys are being taught from a very young age that they will be shunned by neighbors,
and girls won’t go out with them if they refuse “to serve their Motherland.”
It does work, unfortunately. Even during the unjust war, it is still trying to portray draft dodgers and deserters as cowards.
A German soldier, Stefan Herder, deserted in the summer of 1942 after witnessing a mass murder of Jews.
Stefan decided that he had nothing in common with the German soldiers who had lost all humanity.
He deserted, was captured, and thrown into a concentration camp, miraculously surviving it.
Does that sound like cowardice to you?
Another example is the Vietnam War. At the time, It was called dirty.
Tens of thousands of Americans refused to take part in it. Those included household names.
One of them was Mohammed Ali, arguably the greatest boxer of all time.
The whole world held its breath watching four sailors desert from an American aircraft carrier.
Their lives were not in danger, since the ships of that class were outside of the range of enemy fire.
But the planes the ship launched were bombing Vietnamese cities.
Sailors fueled those jets and attached bombs to their pylons.
Those four guys wanted no part of it and deserted when stationed in Japan.
Them getting to neutral Sweden was a great ordeal. They did it through the USSR, by the way.
The guys were christened the Intrepid Four because they served onboard the aircraft carrier called Intrepid.
The American draft dodgers and deserters were really risking it.
There are UN in place, for sure. But the government ignores them for the most part.
In 2017, Linley Lemburg, 75, was arrested in the U.S.
He had deserted the Vietnam War and had been hiding under a false name in Florida.
Forty-two years after the war had ended, he was apprehended and tried in court.
Although he narrowly avoided the prison sentence, it did take a toll on the guy.
Next, we’ll talk about Russia and the morally ambiguous cases.
Before that, we’ll take a break for a non-commercial announcement. Please watch it.
NON-COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
RUSSIA IS NO EXCEPTION
Russia had its share of deserters, too. Even Mikhail Lomonosov, the great Russian polymath, was one of them.
In 1736, whilst studying chemistry in the German city of Marburg, he wound up conscripted into the Prussian army,
its cavalry division. It happened against his will, and he successfully deserted.
Russia might have lost its famous scientist if things had gone sour.
There were plenty of deserters in the Russian army, too. The trend bloomed during the very unpopular WW1.
By 1917, the official number of deserters hit a staggering 360,000.
The unofficial figure was a lot higher, though, up to 1.5 million.
The towns of the collapsing empire were filled with soldiers reluctant to die for someone else’s profit.
Anti-war songs were ringing in the air to the tune of folk instruments.
During the just war against the Nazis, Stalin’s regime, too, encountered people unwilling to die for their country.
In 1941, between June 22 and the end of the year, the NKVD, the department for internal affairs,
arrested more than 710,000 military deserters and over 71,000 mobilization dodgers.
Not all Soviet citizens took the Soviet–Afghan war as their “international duty,” either.
There were not only deserters but also soldiers changing sides and fighting for the Afghan mujahideen.
After the war was over, the Supreme Council of the USSR issued an amnesty to all fighting in Afghanistan.
Not all of them returned home, though.
Last September, Russia saw a mass exodus of draft dodgers.
The number of people who left the country fleeing the mobilization drive ranges from half a million to two million.
There is no exact figure as of yet.
The most notable example would be several mile-long lines of people swarming the Verkhny Lars checkpoint
at the Russian border with Georgia.
Multiple young Russians were buying bicycles in the nearby city of Vladikavkaz and rode their way to freedom.
A whole mound of bikes ended up ditched right on the other side of the border.
There is a monument to a bicycle in Tbilisi erected in 2001.
Georgians are now calling it a monument to the heroes of Verkhny Lars. Every age has its own heroes, after all.
A RIGHT TO TREASON
The wars provide us with examples of something more than just passive resistance.
There have been people actively revolting against the madness of their commanders.
In 1968, during the Vietnam War, American soldiers committed mass murder in Sơn Mỹ village, in South Vietnam.
At least, 500 Vietnamese civilians were slaughtered, including 173 children and 183 women.
It was a bloodbath; the soldiers lost all shreds of humanity.
There was only one private who tried to stop his fellow soldiers. When that failed, he shot himself in the foot.
He was sent a medevac Huey and airlifted to a hospital. The massacre raged on.
Some villagers tried to escape through the rice fields.
Americans were chasing them even there; the killings did not stop.
That’s when Hugh Thompson Jr., a helicopter pilot, spotted the massacre and landed his aircraft
between the fleeing villagers and the GIs.
He ordered his door gunners, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, to fire over the soldiers’ heads.
Thanks to that, there were several dozen Vietnamese survivors.
Not everyone in the U.S. approved of their actions, though.
Even more dramatic was the fate of German conspirators, plotting to kill Hitler and stop the war.
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg exploded a mine in the Führer’s conference room.
The dictator had a lucky escape, though. Nearly 7,000 arrests followed the botched attempt.
Many of those people were executed.
Their relatives were shipped to concentration camps, and children were sent to orphanages.
None of them atoned.
One of the co-conspirators, Heinrich Lendorf, said, “Every citizen has a right to treason in a dictatorship.”
It’s a pity that there was no Stauffenberg during Stalin’s repressions in Russia and no Russian Thompsons
and Colburns during the Bucha massacre in Ukraine.
PARTAKING IN MADNESS
Speaking of Bucha, it is a war crime.
Under the international law, those responsible for killing civilians must be prosecuted
as well as the ones giving such orders.
There will be a manhunt for those uniformed murderers. There is no statute of limitations for these crimes.
Sure, human rights laws are far from perfect.
At a Russian military enlistment office, you can reference the UN articles all you want, explaining
that you don’t want to partake in the war as an aggressor.
But a senior draft officer will tell you that Russia is not an aggressor, that they were attacked by NATO forces,
and that you have to “defend the Motherland.”
No one would listen to you.
You’d be given a rusty Kalashnikov, sent to the battlefield, and killed during the first assault.
No article is going to punch your ticket out of it.
If you don’t end up killed, though, they will force you to kill others, including prisoners and civilians.
Sure, the international law counts that as a crime.
But there won’t be a UN commissioner next to that soldier, but his commander.
Most probably that will be a petty tyrant or a bloodthirsty thug.
Everyone will have to make their own decisions there: whether to kill, be killed, shoot yourself in the foot,
open fire on your own, or desert. There is no safe option here.
You need to remember that shirking the conscription or mobilization carries a prison term of three years,
refusal to take part in the war up to 10, and deserting up to 15 years.
The best way is to avoid the army altogether.
If you set the propaganda aside and look at the whole thing with your eyes open,
it becomes crystal clear that the Russian government has lost its marbles.
What can a Russian do in a situation like this? Either join the cuckoo squad or the Fifth Column.
IT’S UP TO YOU
After the Cold War ended, humanity got a chance at a new age, one of peace and prosperity.
You don’t need to be a genius to see that trade is better than war.
That chance was shattered, though. Along came Putin with his medieval take on the world,
showering peaceful Ukrainian cities with bombs.
Ukraine was forced to defend its freedom and democracy with an armed hand.
Whatever the Russian propaganda machine spits out and however it tries to defend the aggression,
we must always remember that the war Putin has started is a crime.
Your unwillingness to partake in it is not treason, but a moral obligation. Everyone will have to make a choice.
Not making one is also a choice. Please, make the right one. Don’t side with Evil.
See you tomorrow!