The wives of Russian conscripts campaigning for an end to mobilisation have said that agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB) have begun interrogating and threatening their husbands on the front line.
Describing the FSB’s “systematic” summoning of conscripts for questioning, informal campaign group The Way Home said that during interrogation officers would go through the subject’s phone looking for information on their relatives.
“Then they get threats like, ‘Make a video saying everything is fine or we’ll send you into battle with a one-way ticket’. Or they tell them to tell their wives to shut up,” the post on the group’s Telegram channel said.
Threatening “global publicity” should anything happen to their husbands such as “accidentally getting hit by a shell” or “finding themselves in combat”, the group warned that everyone would “know who did it.”
“We will publicise your atrocities to the world at large. And the whole rotten truth will be revealed. … What use is a president who pretends we don’t exist, and who lives solely in a fantasy world totally under his control?”