Recruits from Tuva, the homeland of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, recorded a video message in which they complained about abuse by servicemen of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” and the military police, reports Meduza.

The video, recorded in the Tuvan language, and its translation into Russian were published in the Telegram channel “Asians from Russia”.

In the video, several men in masks and camouflage clothing are standing in front of the forest. One of them states that this group was mobilized on September 29, after which it underwent training in Novosibirsk for three months.

According to him, in the training part, recruits “were not prepared for front-line combat” and were promised that they would be sent to new military training. At the same time, recruits from Tuva complain that at the end of last year, some of them were sent to the front line in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

After several of them were wounded, soldiers in Shoigu’s home region say they discovered they were not actually assigned to any Russian Defense Ministry unit, but to pro-Russian separatist forces led by Denis Pusilin. Soldiers in Tuva say they are now “disabled” but stress they are not refusing to fight.

Recruits from Tuva say they were abused by separatist soldiers

“On February 4, 2023, DPR soldiers arrived. They shot with machine guns, forced to do push-ups. They said we won’t get out of here alive. They said that we are theirs, you have police… The military police came and beat us,” said one of the soldiers.

The Taiga.info site, focused on news from Siberia, also reports that it received from its readers a video recording of a beating by Donetsk separatists mobilized in Tuva, as well as an audio recording made by a man from the “people’s militia.” Militia” named after Batya.

Another Russian website notes that this is actually a reference to a separatist lieutenant colonel named Vyacheslav Gubin. In the audio recording, “Batya” says, in order to justify the violence against the military in Tuva, that in 2014-2015 the Ukrainian army would throw “everyone who disobeyed the officers” into the quarry.

“When I came here to you, Comrade General, knowing my character, said to me: “Father, please do not kill them. All of them are related to Shoigu. Now you will soften them, and the parents will start calling Shoigu uncle”, – says the Donetsk officer to the Russian recruits.

Tuva, a province in central Siberia, is considered one of the hardest hit in the war launched by President Vladimir Putin, even before a “partial” mobilization was issued on September 21 last year.

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