The judges of the Supreme Court approved a resolution at the plenum on May 18, in which they explained, in particular, how the military would be tried under the new article of the Criminal Code on voluntary surrender. Voluntary surrender of a soldier, if possible to resist, is now equated with a criminal offense.
“Voluntary surrender is qualified under Article 352.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation only if there are no signs of a crime under Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (high treason). If the court establishes that a person who participated in the composition of the forces (troops) of a foreign state, international or foreign organization directly opposed to the Russian Federation in an armed conflict, hostilities or other actions with the use of weapons and military equipment, surrendered precisely for these purposes, the deed is subject to assessment only as high treason in the form of going over to the side of the enemy,” the decision of the Plenum of the Supreme Court says.
The decree also says that the military must "provide resolute resistance to the enemy, avoiding capture, in battle he is obliged to fulfill his military duty with honor." Surrender can be considered voluntary if the soldier was captured in a helpless state due to injury or shell shock, the Sun believes.
Lawyer Vadim Bagaturia from the Freitak and Sons collegium, advising one of The Insider's interlocutors, said that interviews that Russian servicemen gave in Ukrainian captivity can be used as evidence of voluntary surrender, says Bagaturia:
“According to the Code of Criminal Procedure, these [similar interviews] are “other evidence.” If a person does not deny that he is on the video and does not deny his words, there is no reason not to trust this. On the other hand, he may say that he acted under compulsion. But who might be interested in this is a big question. If there is an intention to punish him.”
The lawyer suggested that the conditions under which the military surrendered would be clarified at the stage of the pre-investigation check, for example, using a polygraph:
“They exchanged some servicemen for others, and when the Russians got home, counterintelligence is obliged to check them to see if the captivity was justified or it was sabotage. In the place of counterintelligence, I would send people to a polygraph, which perfectly demonstrates where a person can keep silent. For those who did not pass the polygraph, more detailed work would be carried out, witnesses would be interviewed, motives would be studied, and so on, because someone can surrender, and then return to their own and say that I was taken prisoner in heavy battles . Those who cause the greatest suspicion will be subjected to verification.
Bagaturia also noted that the military has video recorders and mobile phones that allow them to record the conditions under which they were forced to surrender. “Many of our servicemen use Go pro cameras and these recordings can be stored on removable media or transmitted somewhere via radio. In addition, at the time of certain events, there may be other people around who could provide clarification about what happened.
At the same time, the director of the human rights group “Citizen. Army. Right ”Sergey Krivenko, in a conversation with The Insider, noted that he did not yet know about any initiated criminal case on surrender, and suggested that they had not yet been started:
“The Supreme Court continues to pretend that Russia has a rule of law, to clarify and clearly apply the concepts if there are such cases, but this is difficult. It was a practice in the Soviet Union when in 1942 there was a whole network of filtration camps, where former Soviet prisoners of war in the occupied territories fell, and it was there that they looked whether he himself surrendered or not, they looked for evidence against him for several months. And then a person was either condemned for surrendering, or not condemned and sent to freedom or called back into the army.
There was a whole system of interrogation, but now they are released, exchanged, and probably after the exchange they are checked, the FSB officers talk to them, but there are no cases of conviction for surrender under this article. I didn’t follow on purpose, but I haven’t seen a single case since September.”
In Russia, meanwhile, they began to hide data on sentences to the military, using the excuse that from now on this information is an official secret. The corresponding orders were issued by the Ministry of Defense and the FSB of the Russian Federation. According to an investigation by Mediazona, data on the relevant sentences disappeared from the statistics of the Judicial Department at the Supreme Court of Russia.
We are talking about several qualifications of crimes provided for by articles of chapter 33 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. In particular, these are sentences on “Forcible actions against the boss” (Article 334 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), on “Unauthorized leaving a unit or place of service” (Article 337 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), as well as criminal cases for “Failure to comply with an order” (Article 332 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). ) and "Voluntary surrender" (Article 352.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
Last autumn, Kiev announced that if a citizen of the Russian Federation was forcibly sent to war with Ukraine, he can surrender and he will be guaranteed safety.