Moscow's campaign for students to sign army contracts comes as the Kremlin seeks to sustain its war effort for a fifth year.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/54631718

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Replacing the dead and wounded has become key to maintaining Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, and authorities have presented the scheme that Averin [a former student turned soldier whose death has been verified by the BBC] was recruited through as a voluntary route into a modern, high-tech and relatively safe branch of the military.

Students are offered a special one-year contract to serve in a new branch of the military known as “unmanned systems troops” - as drones have become central to the war in Ukraine.

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[Averin’s] mother believes he was not used as the protected technical specialist he had expected to become: “He said nothing would happen to him.”

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  • idiomaddict
    3·
    2 days ago

    Averin grew up in an orphanage in eastern Siberia until he was taken into foster care aged 11. By the time he was recruited into the army he was in his final year at the Buryat Republican Technical School of Construction.

    Early in April, he called his foster mother to say he was being sent somewhere “with no [phone] signal”, and that she should not worry.

    Initially he said he had gone away to earn money at Wildberries, a Russian online retailer, and she was shocked to find out he had signed a military contract and had completed training as a drone operator.

    “He told me: ‘Nothing will happen to me, everything will be fine.’”

    A week later, on 8 April, she learned he had been killed in a mortar strike near Russian-occupied Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

    I go back and forth with sympathy for the soldiers themselves (it gets harder to feel nothing for a dumb, scared 18 year old who signed up for something they didn’t understand, the further from 18 I get), but what a horrible thing for that foster mother. She must have wanted to have a child to take care of for so long, and she thought he was safe as a student and about to become qualified for a good job that supports his community, but he’s just suddenly gone.