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The Tribunal for Putin (T4P) global initiative was set up in response to the all-out war launched by Russia against Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia forcibly conscripts Mariupol lads into its invading army

20.11.2024   
Halya Coynash
Young Ukrainians have been forced to ‘swear allegiance’ to the country that has invaded their homeland, causing carnage, destruction and immense suffering

Young conscripts Photo Petro Andriushchenko

Young conscripts Photo Petro Andriushchenko

Almost three years after Russia began its relentless bombardment and siege of Mariupol and the surrounding area, the aggressor state has begun conscripting those young lads who survived into its army and forcing them to swear allegiance to the invader.  It is claimed that the young Ukrainians will not be sent to fight Russia’s war against Ukraine, however such assurances were made and proven to be empty back in 2014 and will likely be again.

The Mariupol City Council posted photos, presumably from Russian propaganda sources, of the first young conscripts.  They are, supposedly, to serve in Russian military units in occupied Crimea; Rostov oblast and Krasnodar krai, but as the Council notes “there is no guarantee. After all, the Russians have repeatedly used young people for the frontline, to save their forces they will, where needed, use Ukrainians as cannon fodder”.

Russia is claiming that the areas it seized and is occupying ‘joined the Russian Federation’ in 2022 and is aggressively forcing residents of all occupied territory to take Russian citizenship.  Such methods and claims were first tried – and condemned by international bodies, courts and democratic countries - back in 2014-15 after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. 

The situation could not be clearer.  An invading state cannot unilaterally change borders, with Crimea remaining Ukrainian territory and Russian an occupying state.  The same applies to any other Ukrainian territory which Russia is now controlling, and Russia has been repeatedly told to get out by, among others, the UN General Assembly, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the EU and OSCE. 

With respect to conscription, therefore the situation is entirely unequivocal. Article 51 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War states that “The Occupying Power may not compel protected persons to serve in its armed or auxiliary forces. No pressure or propaganda which aims at securing voluntary enlistment is permitted”. 

Nothing at all is changed by the fact that Russia has forced Ukrainians on occupied territory to take its citizenship.  Quite the contrary, in fact, as Russia’s aggressive measures aimed at foisting its own citizenship and at forcing Ukrainians to renounce their own can be viewed as a war crime.  The 1907 Hague Convention, for example, clearly states that “it is forbidden to compel the inhabitants of occupied territory to swear allegiance to the hostile Power.”

There was evidence from 2014 that Russia’s defence ministry was either sending Russian conscripts to fight in Donbas or was placing them under intolerable pressure to force them into signing so-called ‘contracts’.  There is nothing to suggest that the methods are any different now.  The situation, however, is, since Russia is now waging an open war of aggression.  The enemy state and any part of Ukraine that it is occupying are, therefore, likely platforms for military conflict.  The claim, therefore, that Ukrainian conscripts can safely be sent to occupied Crimea is cynical and knowingly false.

There is every reason to fear that Russia would treat Ukrainian conscripts like cannon fodder.  Immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the occupation regime in the Russian proxy ‘Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics’ began forcibly rounding up any men they could find, regardless of their age, state of health and citizenship.  Men were grabbed at work or off the streets and, within a week or two, sent to the front where they were effectively abandoned by their commanders without any food or water.  Huge numbers are likely to have died, with Russia clearly preferring to send Donbas men since their deaths did not need to be recorded, or their families paid ‘’compensation’. As of July 2023, Ukraine’s Military Intelligence was reporting that 55-60 thousand Ukrainian men were likely to have been forcibly mobilized.

It was clear from September 2022 that a major reason for Russia’s fake ‘referendum’ on occupied parts of Donetsk; Luhansk; Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts was to claim that the occupied territory and its citizens had ‘become Russian’ with this opening the possibility of forcibly mobilizing a huge number of Ukrainians. In late 2023, the Mariupol City Council received a copy of ‘instructions’ from the occupation ‘education department’, with this setting out how to ensure that 17-year-olds were forced, from January 2024, to register at the Russian occupation military recruitment office and thus be in danger of open or covert mobilization into Russia’s army. 

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