It seems to be becoming a trend in Russia: (former) administrators and politicians who want to avoid prison and other shame by joining the struggle in Ukraine.
This week the Russian mass newspaper reported Moskovsky Komsmolets about the umpteenth case. Aleksandr Chakonov reported to the front in Ukraine because, according to media reports, he had to serve his prison sentence. Chakonov was a deputy in the parliament of the Krasnodar region and reported to the police at the end of March that his 35-year-old wife had left home and disappeared without a trace.
After a thorough police interrogation, the former politician broke down, confessed to stabbing his wife to death during an argument and burying the body in a forest. In August, Chakonov was sentenced to nearly ten years in a strict penal colony. The former deputy twice appealed against the verdict, but the court did not respond. Chakonov then decided to join the ranks of Wagner’s private army in eastern Ukraine.
Mayor Rustyam Abushayev of Bolshoi Kamen in Russia’s far east did not even want to wait for a conviction. In March, the judge issued an arrest warrant to him, partly because of large-scale fraud involving land plots. When the police came to arrest Abushayev, his associates reported that the first citizen was ‘on vacation’. A source then told local media that the driver had gone to Ukraine as a volunteer to fight.
“Following the governor’s appeal and an apple from the heart,” Abushayev said magnanimously a few days later, confirming on Telegram his entry to the battlefield. Abushayev’s urge to act, however, seemed to have been premature: at the end of April, the judge ruled that the warrant for his arrest was invalid due to procedural errors.
At the beginning of February, Deputy City Council Chairman of Kursk, Maksim Vasiliev, posted a video on Vkontakte, the Russian counterpart of Facebook. He is standing somewhere in a forest near an armored vehicle and the rattle of machine guns can be heard in the background. ,,Well, I reached the front line, it wasn’t easy”, says Vasiliev, somewhat embarrassed. “I am a few kilometers from the front. It’s hard at first, but by nightfall you get used to explosions and machine gun fire.”
Hawaii shirt
The video is in stark contrast to a video that Vasiliev posted a month earlier, which led to national commotion. He brags about his holiday in Mexico. In his Hawaiian shirt, with prawns on the plate in front of him and a few bottles of beer within reach, he jokingly wishes his compatriots a happy New Year.
It angered many Russians. They accused Vasiliev of complete indifference to the fate of the probably hundreds of Russian soldiers who died on New Year’s Eve in a rocket attack by the Ukrainian army on the eastern Ukrainian city of Makiivka.
The governor of the Kursk region was also furious and Deputy Chairman Andrey Turchak of the Federation Council, the Russian upper chamber, demanded Vasilyev’s resignation. He complied and turned up four weeks later in soldier’s uniform in the Donbas. It is not known whether the politicians are still at the front or are still alive.
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