Russian military courts received 4,121 criminal cases regarding unauthorized abandonment after the start of mobilization.Mediazona collected this information from the websites of military courts as of November 21.
Decisions have already been made on 3,470 cases. As Mediazona wrote, since June 2023, military courts have handed down 100 sentences per week in such cases. The peak occurred in August — 457 verdicts in that month.
In addition to 4.1 thousand criminal cases of unauthorized abandonment of a unit, by November the courts received 317 cases of failure to comply with an order (332 Criminal Codes). The punishment under such an article is, as a rule, much milder than for SOCH.
Almost all cases of failure to comply with the order were filed in the Kaliningrad region, Rostov, Primorsky Krai and Kamchatka (more details on the map below).
Under the more serious article on desertion (338 of the Criminal Code), 96 cases filed after the start of mobilization were brought to court.
Most cases of unauthorized abandonment of a unit end in a suspended sentence, and for contract soldiers the share of such decisions is 63%, and for mobilized soldiers it is slightly lower — 56%. A suspended sentence allows a serviceman to be returned to the front.
Map of distribution of criminal cases by region: