Russian courts have already received more than 500 cases against servicemen who refuse to obey orders after the start of mobilization. As Mediazona found out , contract soldiers and mobilized people are leaving en masse, refusing to go to Ukraine or deserting from the front.
In particular, the garrison courts have already received 536 cases under articles for unauthorized abandonment of a unit, failure to comply with an order, desertion and other articles toughened after the start of mobilization. Almost half of them have already been sentenced. At the same time, as Mediazona writes, there are more and more such cases every month, March 2023 has already become a record.
The most common accusation is the unauthorized leaving of the unit (471 cases in court, in more than half of the cases a person was absent from the unit for more than a month). About a third of those sentenced under this article receive suspended sentences, which allows them to be sent back to the front.
Also, the courts are now considering 25 cases of servicemen who do not run away, but directly refuse to go to war – they are accused of disobeying the order.
More than 20 cases concern military personnel who used violence against the commander, 14 people are accused of desertion. "Mediazona" reports isolated cases under "other articles":
Now, for Russian military personnel, surrender (Article 352.1 of the Criminal Code) on a voluntary basis is considered a crime, the punishment for this is imprisonment for a term of three to ten years. On the eve of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, it was clarified that it would be the deliberate surrender of prisoners that would be considered a crime if it was possible to avoid this and provide "resolute resistance" to the enemy. There will be no corpus delicti, only if the soldier is not able to evade captivity, for example, he is seriously wounded or shell-shocked.
Read more about what lawyers have to say about this here .