The St. Petersburg region’s Gatchinskiy City Court has satisfied the claim of mobilised citizen Pavel Mushumansky, having deemed that his mobilisation had been illegal, head of the Agora human rights group Pavel Chikov reports.
The man in question was undergoing alternative civilian service as a form of the one-year-long mandatory military service. Despite that, he was mobilised and sent to a military unit.
Mushumansky went to court to challenge the decision. The court suspended the mobilisation decision and assigned the responsibility of returning Mushumansky back home so he could participate in the court proceedings to the command of the unit.
Yesterday, 29 November, a St. Petersburg resident, who had previously tried to change his military service from active to alternative civilian service, was taken to a military unit. St. Petersburg’s City Court did not grant the appeal in the case of mobilised Russian citizen Kirill Berezin.
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 (the Kamenka unit), Anatoly Smerdov.