Less than two weeks later, Nikiforov became one of the first mobilized men to be killed as Ukraine pushed forward with its successful counteroffensive.

“His sister received the draft paper,” Alexander Zelensky, president of the Neva Bar Association of which Nikiforov was a member, told The Moscow Times. “He notified me about it, gathered his belongings the next day and went to the training center.”

Human rights lawyer Pavel Chikov wrote on Telegram on Thursday that Nikiforov was killed near the occupied Ukrainian city of Lysychansk on Oct. 7.

“He was a good person, honest and brave,” said Zelensky.

Reports of mobilized soldiers dying in Ukraine — from lawyers such as Nikiforov to residents of far-flung Siberian villages and even former Moscow officials — have emerged with increasing rapidity in recent days, suggesting that new soldiers have been thrown into battle with minimal training.

Three mobilized men aged 32, 40 and 42 from Siberia’s Krasnoyarsk region died in Ukraine on Oct. 8, local media reported Friday.

ll three of the men were reportedly killed exactly 10 days after they were drafted.

And local authorities in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region, near the Ural mountains, confirmed Thursday the death of five mobilized men from the region’s Korkino district.

“We are mourning with the relatives and express our deepest and most sincere condolences,” said a spokesperson for the region’s governor, Alexei Teksler, local news outlet 74.ru reported.

But the deaths in Chelyabinsk also caused outrage on social media, with some locals asking why the men appeared not to have been given any training.

“Does Teksler, perhaps, have a desire to check why the boys ended up at the front lines in just a week and died with no training and no necessary equipment?” user Anyuta Stepanova wrote in response to a post about the deaths on social network VKontakte.

When announcing mobilization on Sept. 21, Putin pledged that all men drafted into the army would receive extra training before being sent to the front.

Despite confirming the number of dead draftees, the Chelyabinsk authorities neither revealed the circumstances of the death nor the names of the five soldiers — fueling panic among locals who hadn’t received any news from mobilized relatives.

“People haven’t been able to reach [their relatives] since Oct. 3,” one user, Irina Baumgertner, wrote in a comment under a post about the deaths.

Source:themoscowtimes.com/2022/10/14