![]() "I said: 'Son, you have such a large family, with whom will they be?' And he said that the sooner he leaves, the sooner he will return. "I didn't want to let him go," Gudo, Koltun's mother, told RFE/RL. He showed up at the local recruitment office on September 25 to present his papers. He had also served previously in the military - in the Airborne Forces - which made him a prime candidate to be mobilized under the Putin order, an order that prioritized men in the reserves or those simply with prior military service. Koltun first worked as a security guard and later he and his mother pooled resources to invest in a shoe shop in Bratsk, an industrial city of 224,000 located on the banks of the Angara River. Koltun and his wife, Galina, his relatives told RFE/RL, were raising six children together in a one-room apartment that Galina has been given free-of-charge by the government due to her being an orphan.įour of their children were from Galina's first marriage the youngest was a 16-month-old girl. 'All Mothers Need To Think Before Sending Their Sons There' "What really happened there, we still don't know," she told RFE/RL's Siberia Realities. Others, like Koltun's, are unexplained, and his relatives fear they will never find out how he died. Many of the deaths have been reported as suicides. At least 16 people have died, according to news reports and activists, since Putin made the announcement on September 21. The process has also seen a small, but growing number of fatalities. Soldiers have taken to posting videos on Russian social networks complaining about the conditions and disorganization. Newly mobilized soldiers - known colloquially in Russian as mobiki - have reported being left without food and water while awaiting orders videos have shown logistics officers telling new conscripts to buy their own equipment, or take first-aid supplies from their own home medicine cabinets - or even their wives' personal sanitary supplies. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Russians are being called up under the process.īy all accounts, the process has been chaotic and haphazard. Russia is continuing to ramp up its mobilization efforts, a massive campaign aimed at shoring up the faltering, seven-month war in Ukraine and, by extension, the credibility of the Kremlin. "My daughter-in-law…told me, she called me in tears in the middle of the night and said that Sasha had died," Koltun's mother, Yelena Gudo, said, using Aleksandr's familiar, affectionate name. Nine days later, his relatives said, he was dead. ![]() ![]() He, and a batch of other conscripts, were sent later that day to Novosibirsk for further preparations for deployment. Four days after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the order to mobilize hundreds of thousands of men to fight in Ukraine, Aleksandr Koltun, a 35-year-old father of six, showed up at the local draft board office in the Siberian city of Bratsk and presented himself for service.
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