Military courts in southern Russia and the North Caucasus are constantly hearing civil lawsuits against the Russian Ministry of Defense from contract soldiers who participated in the invasion of Ukraine, writes the news portal “Kavkaz.realii”.
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According to decisions published on the website of the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don, since the beginning of this year, the main reasons for lawsuits from contract soldiers from southern Russia and the North Caucasus are illegal deployment to the front, refusal to dismiss from service, and disputes over payments.
For example, Tayfur Bekbulatov, a contract soldier from the Volgograd region, demanded that the Ministry of Defense pay him for the nine months he spent detained in a brigade of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. The documents do not specify what the serviceman was specifically suspected of.
It is only known that T. Bekbulatov was sent to Ukraine on May 21, 2022, and five days later he was arrested. He was released from the Donetsk commandant’s office only at the end of January 2023 – no criminal case was ever opened against him.
The man demanded that this period be included in his length of service and that he be paid the same daily allowances and compensation for unused days off as other participants in the invasion. However, the Volgograd court, and subsequently the appellate court, rejected his claim.
According to the article, on the night of February 19, 2023, an explosion occurred at the location of a Russian unit in the Donetsk People’s Republic: one of the contract soldiers accidentally detonated a grenade. At least three soldiers were injured.
According to presidential decrees, each of them received three million rubles in compensation. However, the Nalchik military court later ruled that the payments were illegal because the contract soldiers suffered from the actions of a comrade, not in battles with the Ukrainian armed forces. The commander of the military unit who signed the compensation order was held accountable.
The court made a similar conclusion in the case of Magomed Omarov from Dagestan. In June 2024, a contract soldier who had been fighting since the beginning of the full-scale invasion was involved in a traffic accident in Ukraine. He was diagnosed with fractures of the clavicle, scapula, and lumbar spine. The circumstances of the traffic accident are not specified in the case, but after compensation and service procedures, the Makhachkala military service court ordered the man to return three million rubles. The serviceman successfully appealed the decision and kept the money.
“Jumped out” of the contract?
It is noted that only one appeal case regarding illegal conscription this year ended in favor of the plaintiff – but the litigation itself has been ongoing for almost three years.
In December 2022, the district military commissariat of the Volgograd region declared local resident Yevgeny Klimentyev unfit for service due to a confirmed duodenal ulcer. However, just two days later, this conclusion was overturned by the regional conscription commission, and Klimentyev was immediately mobilized for the war against Ukraine.
At the front, according to the serviceman, he received no medical care and could not adhere to a diet. Since the command refused to send him for a second medical examination, and fellow soldiers “mocked” him, he developed depression. Already in January 2023, the mobilized soldier was hospitalized, and in May, due to his health condition, he was discharged from the army.
According to Ivan Chuvilyayev, a human rights defender from the anti-war project “Go to the Forest,” judicial practice shows that the main problem in sending partially recovered or initially unfit for service individuals to the front lies in the work of military medical commissions.
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“The examination is carried out very carelessly. No one looks at injuries; they just automatically stamp the same fitness category. It is assumed that a person gets leave for rehabilitation – not to some sanatorium to train an injured leg, but simply returns home for 40 days – and then they send him back. This is a common scheme, and this is where the problem lies: It is impossible to “jump out” of the contract, to terminate it.
The only answer to any questions is that the contract is indefinite until [Russian President Vladimir] Putin signs a decree on the suspension of mobilization. And no one will ever give you any paper stating that you are truly injured. Even if you go to a paid clinic for treatment, the result will be exactly the same, because you will still have to go through a military medical commission, where they will say: “The clinic wrote that you don’t have a leg, but we don’t see it,” – I. Chuvilyayev ironized.
Artem Klyga, head of the legal department of the “Movement of Conscientious Objectors,” admitted in an interview with the editorial board that the organization practically no longer accepts cases challenging illegal conscription or return to the front. According to him, the level of arbitrariness of the Ministry of Defense in this area is so high that specialists no longer see a legal solution to the problem.
Russia does not have official statistics on civil or administrative lawsuits against the Ministry of Defense, making it impossible to accurately track the dynamics of such cases in the fifth year of the full-scale invasion. Only information collected by human rights activists can be analyzed.
The organization “Citizen and Army” notes a decrease in the number of lawsuits for discharge from service. Sergei Krivenka, director of the human rights group, told the editorial board that while soldiers still have at least some chance of being discharged due to health conditions, it is practically impossible to do so for all other reasons.
“All instances resist this – the Ministry of Defense, military medical commissions, hospitals. They just want to send a person back to the front, and that’s it. Lawyers and advocates have to make incredible efforts: they have to appeal to the military prosecutor’s office, to their superiors, to draw attention to each case. At the same time, we observe a tendency for servicemen to deliberately refuse to participate in the invasion.
Yes, this falls under Article 332 of the Criminal Code – failure to obey an order, but the serviceman himself wants to be prosecuted. Yes, he will be sent to a penal colony for two or three years, but the person is guaranteed to be discharged from the army. Now several thousand people are taking this path. And here, human rights defenders also face difficulties: they have to ensure that a case is opened, control the investigation, and ensure that the sentence is real, not suspended – because with a suspended sentence, the convicted person can be sent back to the front,” S. Krivenka explained.
“Complete chaos at the front”
A representative of the “Go to the Forest” project believes that the risk of retaliation from the military command is a “question of terminology.”
“The problem is not even that if you sue over your contract, the command will start creating certain obstacles. They will beat, torture, and exploit you anyway. So there is no other way out here. You can call it revenge, you can call it their usual practice. It won’t go away,” he said.
Meanwhile, S. Krivenka added that the main condition for a soldier who wants to defend his rights is to leave the combat zone.
“We mostly work with those who manage to get out of there somehow: get leave or simply escape. There is complete chaos at the front, so it is important to try to leave by any possible means. There is very little information about what is actually happening there,” the human rights defender concluded.
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