Lawmakers from the liberal opposition party Yabloko have called on Russia’s Defense Ministry to stop deploying conscripts in the southwestern Kursk region as the Russian military struggles to halt Ukraine’s assault near the border.
“A number of media reports said it was conscripts who took up the fight when the Ukrainian armed forces invaded the Kursk region,” Alexander Shishlov, who heads Yabloko’s party faction in the St. Petersburg legislative assembly, wrote in a letter to Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov.
Shishlov urged Belousov to confirm whether those reports were accurate and “take measures” against the further deployment of conscripts “on the front line in the [Kursk] region.”
Conscripted soldiers were sent to Russia’s border regions, including Kursk, early in Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Groups of wives and mothers have sought to pressure the government against their deployment on the battlefield amid reports of conscripts being killed fighting despite President Vladimir Putin’s promise that they would not see combat.
The Kremlin has dismissed reports about conscripts being deployed on the battlefield as “absolute distortions of reality.” However, The Moscow Times was recently able to speak with eight conscripted Russian soldiers being held as prisoners of war at a Ukrainian prison.
Some of the conscripts captured during Ukraine’s Kursk offensive were exchanged in a Russian-Ukrainian prisoner swap over the weekend.
A number of senior-ranking members of the Yabloko party have openly called for a ceasefire in Russia’s war against Ukraine. In last year’s regional elections, candidates from the party ran on pro-peace platforms.
Election authorities in St. Petersburg recently barred all 83 Yabloko candidates from running for local office in next week’s municipal elections in the city.
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