MOSCOW. April 9 (Interfax-AVN) - Two armed soldiers deserted their unit in southern Russia on Monday night.
Alexander Semyonkin and Vladimir Aristov, both aged 20, took up a sentry post at a fuel and lubricant depot in Ardon, North Ossetia, a North Ossetian law enforcement source told Interfax- Military News Agency.
The chief guard discovered after midnight that they had gone. Police started looking for the fugitives, each of whom had an assault rifle with 120 cartridges.
The same night, a border guard in the nearby region of Dagestan shot dead four fellow servicemen.
The Federal Border Guard Service told Interfax on Tuesday that Albert Sibogatov seized an assault rifle from a sentry and opened chaotic fire on other soldiers, killing Senior Lieutenant Valery Smirnoi, Senior Ensign Sayid Mansurov and Privates Radik Yarulin and Alexander Gurin.
Sibogatov was arrested by fellow soldiers and put in custody at his border guard station.
Reports said that he was drunk during the incident and was returning to the station after an unauthorized absence.
Desertion from the armed forces has become a regular and frequent practice in Russia, with soldiers running away either armed or unarmed.
The media reports only a small proportion of such instances.
There are no overall official statistics, but reports on individual instances suggest that the scale of desertion is very large.
For example, 212 deserters were found in an operation in the Far Eastern military district in November and December last year.
Operations to look for deserters are becoming regular, but the military puts their maximum effectiveness at 50%.
Numerous cases of desertion have been reported by the media in 2002.
Senior Sergeants Dmitry Maximov and Renat Zabirov, members of an engineering unit in Novosibirsk region, went AWOL on January 9. They did not take any weapons with them, but about RUB500,000 (USD16,020) was taken from a strongbox. The money had been paid to their unit for clearing the area around an ammunition depot of unexploded artillery shells that had been scattered by a fire and resultant explosions in the depot.
Two 18 year-old soldiers serving their first year near the village of Bolon, Amur district of the Khabarovsk territory beat up the officer on duty and took his pistol on January 21. They then pointed the pistol at a guard, took his carbine and ran away. The two were detained later in the day.
On February 4, Junior Sergeant Almaz Shageyev and Private Mikhail Sukhorukov fled the 31st separate paratrooper brigade in the Ulyanovsk region with two Kalashnikov assault rifles and 135 rounds of ammunition. They fired at a traffic police checkpoint on the boundary between the region and the Tatarstan autonomous republic. The two deserters seized a police car and a car owned by a guard service in Buinsk, Tatarstan. They also took the pistol of one of the police officers they had killed. The deserters were later killed while resisting arrest.
Within less than the 24 hours they were on the run, the deserters killed nine people. These included two civilian drivers in the Ulyanovsk region, five police officers and two civilians in Tatarstan. Two more police officers were wounded.
Armed with a Kalashnimov rifle, Private Alexei Khozeyev of the Interior Ministry troops left his unit near Zelenokums, Stavropol territory, on February 13. On the same day, the dead bodies of Captain Panasenko and Warrant Officer Dotsenko, apparently killed with an automatic weapon, were found on a road. Later the car they had driven was also found. A chevron of the Interior Ministry troops and a soldier's bag were found in the car, which suggested that Khozeyev had a hand in the murder.
Khozeyev was placed on the federal wanted list. He fired his rifle, but missed, when an attempt to arrest him was made on February 19. Khozeyev escaped under cover of darkness. He was apprehended in the Mineralnyie Vody district of the Stavropol territory unarmed. He now faces two murder charges.
A deserter whose name remains unknown to the media was apprehended in the Khabarovsk territory on March 11. The dead bodies of three women, aged 73, 44 and 42, were found in a Nikolayevsk-on-Amur apartment the day before, each with 7 to 11 stab wounds. Two younger women were raped. The criminal was a 20 year old youth who deserted his unit in October 2001.
The Russian Defense Ministry makes such incidents an issue of sweeping investigations with subsequent dismissals and demotions of the commanders involved. The recent "bloody raid" of Ulyanovsk paratroopers nearly led to a change in the status of the Airborne Troops. Following an investigation, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov reprimanded some senior officers of the Airborne Troops and dismissed others after they were found guilty of provoking desertion and violating the rules of storing weapons and ammunition.
But the checks being made and measures being taken are insufficient. Significantly, both former and current military officials prefer not to comment on such incidents. "Now, as before, it is difficult to say what provoked armed servicemen in the Kurgan region to leave their unit. Examinations that are expected to reveal why they left their post are continuing," sources in the Land Forces department for military service security told Interfax-AVN on April 9.
The Russian Criminal Code envisions criminal liability and imprisonment of up to 10 years (depending on the circumstances) for desertion. However, criminal liability may be lifted from a first-time deserter who has neither stolen weapons nor committed crimes and "if his desertion has resulted from serious circumstances" (Article 338 of the Criminal Code.)
Each instance of desertion is investigated. On February 23, the court of the North Caucasus military district passed a verdict on two deserters who, while on guard in the sapper's brigade on July 8, 2001, killed six servicemen and wounded one. One of them was found guilty of killing five people and sentenced to life imprisonment in a high security prison.
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov believes an increasing number of desertion cases result, among other things, from insufficient work by the commanders.
"Flaws in the work of the commanders provoke soldiers to run away from their units," Ivanov earlier told Interfax-AVN. "But we have recently applied sanctions against some of the commanders, despite their military ranks and stars on their shoulder-straps," Ivanov said.
He said employing more civilian personnel is a way to combat desertion. "About 800,000 civilians work in the Armed Forces. I don't think it's the limit. In modern armed forces, there must be three civilians per every combat-ready soldier or officer," Ivanov said.
The military mention a dramatic worsening of the quality of recruits as a negative factor leading to the growth of desertion. Even troops and forces that were previously considered elite now receive problem recruits. The press service for the North Caucasus regional border guard department told Interfax that with the beginning of the spring draft, the department's head, Colonel General Yevgeny Bolkhovotin, instructed his subordinates to work individually with each new recruit arriving at the border guards. This order was prompted by the fact that over recent years, up to 41% of recruits "have negative medical or psychological characteristics."
The press service said that a study of recruits' documents shows that 20% of them were brought up in single-parent or unhappy families, 22% have only junior and secondary education, some 5% have a police record, 14% took drugs and toxic substances, and 7% were alcohol abusers.
Head of the enlistment and mobilization department of the Leningrad Military District Colonel Sergei Talanov told Interfax- AVN that "as the army requires healthy new soldiers, officials of draft offices and the chairmen of military and medical commissions will receive the following guidelines." They include a method of overall and computer testing of recruits for drug- addiction, as well as psychological and physiological suitability tests for military service in various types of forces.
However, some experts view desertion as not only showing "failures" and "flaws" of individual officials and state structures, but also as a symptom of structural flaws in the Armed Forces and other military structures, which can be removed only by military reform and the introduction of alternative service. The Armed Forces' transfer to a contract or competitive basis will bring an end to "hazing," which causes many soldiers to flee, and prevent potential deserters from being recruited into the army and fleet.
The armed forces command puts great hopes on an experiment that will transfer the Pskov-based 76th airborne division onto a contract basis, which is expected to begin in autumn 2002.