A loophole that allowed up to 200,000 Russian youth to evade conscription may be closed if the parliament approves a bill obliging recruits to report for the draft in person, legislators said.
But the bill may be just a public distraction to mask some other potentially unpopular army-related reform, a leading conscript rights activist told RIA Novosti.
A legislative amendment obliging conscripts to pick up their draft summons at their draft stations was filed on late Tuesday with the lower chamber, the State Duma.
The bill, which also contains other unspecified amendments, is likely to be passed in the fall, said Senator Viktor Ozerov, who penned the draft with several colleagues. The Duma will back the proposal, said deputy head of the lower chamber’s Defense Committee, Franz Klintsevich.
Draft-dodging is a criminal offense in Russia, but military officials have to notify potential recruits that they are due for draft.
An estimated 200,000 recruits currently avoid army service by simply being unavailable for draft summons, according to the General Staff’s figures.
“Citizens show up to pick their passports at 14, and we want to do the same with draft summons,” Ozerov said. “Not picking up a draft summons will be a criminal offence, the same as draft dodging.”
But Valentina Melnikova of the Union of Soldiers Mothers' Committees of Russia said that only a small minority of the 200,000 recruits are actual draft dodgers, while the rest may be people on missing lists, detainees or jailed convicts still counted as potential conscripts because of flawed record keeping by the military.
“It’s a distraction. Who knows what else made it into this law?” she said by telephone on Wednesday. The bill’s text still has not appeared on the Duma’s website.
Draft remains a painful issue for Russia because of widespread abuse and bullying of conscripts by their fellows and superiors. The government has mulled the idea of a contract-based army for years, but failed to fully implement it, with some 145,000 due for army service this spring.
