By Dasha Afanasyeva
LONDON – Several Russian soldiers are seeking legal help to avoid being sent to the war in Ukraine, two lawyers said after 12 members of Russia’s National Guard were fired for refusing to go.
Lawyer Mikhail Benyash said around 200 people had been contacted to ask what to do in a similar situation.
Pavel Chikov, another Russia-based lawyer, wrote on Telegram that there are “analogous stories from Crimea, Novgorod, Omsk, Stavropol… The workers are asking for legal assistance.”
Reuters could not independently confirm the rush for legal help. The National Guard did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Ukrainian and Western officials said Russia’s armed forces suffered from very low morale in what Moscow is calling its special operation to disarm and “denazify” its neighbor. The West has labeled it a poorly executed imperial-style land grab.
Moscow has not taken any major cities in five weeks and on Tuesday announced it would sharply scale back operations near Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv, although attacks on Chernihiv continued on Wednesday.
On February 25, a day after the invasion began, a National Guard commander in southern Krasnodar Krai and 11 men from his company refused to obey an order to cross the border into Ukraine, Chikov wrote in a previous post.
The group said the order was illegal because they didn’t have their international passports and because their main job description was limited to Russia, Chikov wrote. They believed that going abroad as part of an armed group would be breaking the law.
Reuters could not independently verify the account.
The soldiers were released, the lawyers said, and filed a wrongful dismissal lawsuit. On Tuesday, however, only three of the 12 have made their claim, according to Benyash, who is representing them.
Russia created the National Guard to fight terrorism and organized crime in 2016. It has since cracked down on peaceful anti-government protests and was put on standby by President Vladimir Putin in 2020 to intervene in Belarus, which itself has been crushing civil unrest.
(Reporting by Dasha Afanasieva; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Nick Macfie)