Why are Russian Soldiers Disobeying Orders?
On June 1, The Wall Street Journal published a report titled “Documents Reveal Hundreds of Russian Troops Broke Ranks Over Ukraine Orders.”
According to military decrees seen by the Wall Street Journal as well as allegations by soldiers and lawyers defending them, hundreds of Russian soldiers fled fighting in Ukraine or refused to participate during the early stages of the war. Military analysts and Ukrainian officials say more soldiers have fled the battlefields.
Heavy Burden
According to a senior Pentagon official in April, the Russian military's movements were severely hampered at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, with thousands of casualties and about a quarter of its deployed military hardware lost.
Escapes and insurrections among soldiers, Interior Ministry forces, and national guard personnel have exacerbated the problem.
Defense experts say desertions are putting Russian authorities in trouble over how to punish them without drawing attention. As a result, the Russian army has become lacking in manpower and is looking for recruits to provide reinforcements in Ukraine.
So far, penalties have largely been limited to formal dismissal. Since Russia has not declared war on Ukraine, there are also few legal grounds for criminal charges against soldiers who refuse to serve abroad, according to a lawyer and former military prosecutor's assistant defending soldiers dismissed for disobedience.
"A lot of soldiers don't want to fight," said Mikhail Benyash, a Russian lawyer representing dozens of members of the National Guard (a local military force suppressing protests in Russia).
According to National Guard documents, Benyash assisted soldiers in challenging the decision to dismiss them after they refused orders to join Russian troops in Ukraine in February. Guards were reportedly sent to Ukraine to patrol the streets and suppress resistance in the occupied areas.
Government officials in Moscow did not respond to requests for comment. Russian soldier Albert Sakhibgareyev, 24, was ordered to go to the Russian Belgorod region on 8 February for military exercises.
After President Vladimir Putin delivered his speech on February 21 rejecting Ukraine's right to independence itself, Sakhibgareyev said that most of his al-Qaeda colleagues confiscated their phones and asked them to wear bulletproof vests. They unloaded a load of projectiles and ammunition from Soviet-era trucks, but they did not know what was ahead.
At dawn on February 24, Sakhibgareyev woke up stunned by artillery fire, with two shells falling a mile and a half from his barracks on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine. Military helicopters and other aircraft flew over the area, apparently heading for battle.
Sakhibgareyev said he only knew what was happening after seeing a telegram indicating that Russia had begun invading Ukraine, after which he would flee the army base and hide.
"None of us want this war," Sakhibgareyev said. His mother said her son joined the army out of love for the homeland and because there were few other jobs in their small town, about 700 miles east of Moscow. His military career was an opportunity to make a life for himself. "I gave birth to a tall sports boy and gave him up to defend the homeland," she said.
Helping Hand
Lawyer Benyash confirmed that within several days of sharing a March 24 publication on the cases of national guard personnel he was defending, more than 1,000 members and employees of the Interior Ministry, which oversees Russia's security, reached out to him for legal aid. Many had defied orders to enter Ukraine to fight or suppress protests in towns occupied by Russian forces.
On March 17, the Russian human rights organization Agora launched a telegram channel to enable soldiers and their relatives to seek legal aid if they were accused of refusing orders. The Group said that 721 members of the army and security forces reached out to the group over the next 10 days.
A military decree signed by a Russian base commander on March 4 ordered the dismissal of hundreds of army soldiers who refused orders while on duty near the Ukrainian border, according to a copy of the document seen by the newspaper. It was not clear whether the former soldiers faced further penalties.
In another document seen by the newspaper signed by a judge at a military court in the city of Nalchik dated 25 May, the Russian base refused to resume the work of 115 members of the Russian National Guard who had been dismissed for refusing to enter Ukraine in late February and early March.
Russian law provides for penalties of up to 10 years' imprisonment for military personnel who fail to perform their duties. Fugitives can be exempted from criminal charges if they can prove that they were under enormous pressure or had personal problems that led them to flee. Members of the army have the right to reject orders they believe are illegal.
Pavel Luzin, a Moscow-based defense expert, noted that the penalty for rejecting orders in what Putin calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine has so far been limited to expelling soldiers without paying their salaries, stripping them of their own mortgage plans, and denying them other service privileges."
"If the number of such cases swells, the government will inadvertently inflate the proportion of underserved persons, which is relatively small but will continue to grow," he said.
Low Paychecks
According to a report from the Russian news outlet Caucasus.Realities, some Russian veterans who served in Ukraine are unwilling to return and fight owing to reduced pay.
Members of the Russian Guard from the Russian city of Krasnodar have filed reports stating that they do not want to be deployed back to Ukraine. Several soldiers refused to fight in the Caucasus due to discontent with the amount they were paid during their time in Ukraine from February to April, according to a source from the Federal Troops of the National Guard. The facts have been revealed.
Part of the reason paychecks were dropping, according to the source, was due to the rising exchange rate of the ruble, Russia's currency.
"Just the other day, a payment for the second month of being there came. And if for the first month they paid 100 thousand, now it's 50. The command explained this by the fall in the dollar exchange rate—the payment is calculated from about 50 dollars per day of stay, but is made in rubles at the Russian exchange rate," the source said.
According to the research, if the dollar rate in Russia was 120 rubles on March 10, it was 56 rubles on May 26, explaining why military salaries had altered.
According to the Wall Street Journal, despite international economic sanctions on Russia slowing economic development even more than countries expected, the ruble's value has risen significantly, gaining over 150 percent since it first plummeted shortly after the invasion began.
Reducing troops' pay does little to address the Russian military's existing issues of low morale and abuse. Soldiers have been asked to pay for weapons and equipment with their own money as their paychecks have shrunk.
