Nearly 600 Russian soldiers were captured in the Kursk region.
ADVERTISEMENTAbout 600 Russian soldiers were captured in the Kursk region three weeks after the start of the Ukrainian incursion, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Oleksandr Syrsky said.
According to him, the majority of these prisoners of war are conscripts: young and relatively inexperienced soldiers, who thought they were only doing their one-year compulsory military service and not taking part in combat… and who did not expect to see Ukrainian troops cross the border.
“Conscripts currently make up a large part of the defense forces in the Kursk region. They are the ones who are captured, they are the ones who are surrounded. And this has been a vulnerability for Putin in terms of domestic perception. And as long as he continues to prove that he is not really interested in protecting the conscripts in Kursk and is using them as his main defensive line, I predict that this will have social consequences in the future,” says Karolina Hird, from the Russian team at the American think tank Institute for the Study of War.
Ivan Chuvilyaev from the Russian NGO “Get Lost”which supports Russians who want to avoid conscription and escape the war, says that since the incursion began, hundreds of people have asked for help from the border regions of Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk: “That is why the regime of anti-terrorist operations was declared, or as Putin calls it: “the anti-terrorist situation”, because it is this regime that allows the use of conscripts in the regions where it has been declared.”
He adds, however, that things changed when more conscripts had to be sent from areas further away from the border. Logistically, it takes longer to transport them: “That is why the most widely used method today is not such a one-day dispatch, but forcing conscripts to sign a contract. This means that the conscript does not just go to the Kursk region, but that after the Kursk region he will not return anywhere, that he will continue to participate in the fighting, either until the end of Putin’s life, or until the end of the war, or until the end of his own life.”
The next Russian conscription is scheduled to begin on October 1. According to the law, new conscripts must have served for at least four months and have a military specialty to participate in combat.
