Five Russian officers went missing after refusing to obey command orders during hostilities in Ukraine. This is reported by the Russian publication Astra.
According to journalists, the soldiers were transferred to a special center in the occupied settlement of Bryanka in the Luhansk region of Ukraine, after which they stopped communicating.
Back in July, these officers wrote reports about their refusal to participate in hostilities.
The mother of one of the missing officers, senior lieutenant Ruslan Levanov, told the Astra publication that her son had written a statement to resign from the Russian armed forces after receiving an order to take the battle point "at all costs", regardless of the loss of life.
After that, according to his mother, Levanov was sent to Bryanka, to the so-called center for restoring the combat resistance of servicemen, where he was brought in the trunk of a car.
Relatives of other officers tell similar stories: Aleksandr Svechikhin, Dmitry Shcherbinkin, Dmitry Volkov, and one more, whose family name was not allowed to be mentioned.
According to relatives, the officers were under moral pressure in Bryanka, and later they were transferred to some kind of basement. Then the connection with them disappeared.
The prosecutorʼs office did not respond to the appeal of the relatives, and in September, an extract suddenly appeared in the war journal stating that all five officers were killed on July 20 as a result of artillery fire.
Co-workers of the missing officers believe they may have been killed.