Drafted St. Petersburg resident who went to court to be able to undergo alternative civilian service instead is being taken to military unit

St. Petersburg’s City Court has not granted the appeal in the case of mobilised Russian citizen Kirill Berezin, who had previously tried to change his military service from active to alternative civilian service, local outlet Fontanka reports, citing lawyer Nikifor Ivanov.

Thus, Berezin’s mobilisation was deemed legal.

“I will, most likely, be deployed to Belgorod and killed there. And it will be easy to attribute [my death] to [military] losses. So my prospects aren’t very bright,” Berezin told BBC News Russian. “I haven’t done anything so bad as to end up between being killed and going to jail. I don’t know what to do now.”

After the court hearing, Berezin went to a local military unit. “There, he was told that somebody from the commandant’s office was coming to get him, that he would be transported to the Kamenka military unit,” his lawyer clarified.

Lawyer Ivanov told local outlet Paper that there are plans to send Berezin from the Kamenka unit to a military unit in the St. Petersburg region town of Luga for Berezin to undergo military service there. According to Ivanov, the Luga unit command has agreed to let Berezin undergo his service “without using weapons”.

On 24 September, Berezin received a draft notice; an hour later, he arrived at a draft office and asked to be allowed to undergo alternative civilian service instead. His report was not considered; on the same day, he was sent to the Kamenka unit for training, from there, he was sent to a campground on the border with Ukraine, near the Russian city of Belgorod. 

The man refused to take a weapon into his hands, not wanting to kill people, and demanded his service be changed to an alternative civilian one.

A month later, Berezin fled the unit and came back to St. Petersburg. He went to the local Investigative Committee, where he confessed to leaving his place of deployment and talked about the death threats he had received from the chief of staff of the military unit 02511, Anatoly Smerdov.