The Ministry of Education and Science continues to lobby for a deferment from mobilization for scientists

“[Universities and research institutes] are routinely working out with the military enlistment offices issues on granting a deferment from mobilization for their employees. Regulatory documents on the procedure for issuing a deferment from conscription for military service for mobilization are marked "for official use." Therefore, they cannot be presented in open sources. These documents are enough to “book” the vast majority of their employees, including the teaching staff”, - the Ministry of Education and Science answered a request from Kommersant.

The publication notes that the draft law on the exemption from the mobilization of doctors and candidates of science was not approved by the Ministry of Defense. Such an initiative was made by the State Duma Committee on Science and Higher Education. The government is expected to side with the defense department, but the committee intends to discuss the bill next week to figure out how to proceed with it.

“Of course, we would like to immediately include all doctors and candidates in it, not to divide into categories. But we decided to move gradually - it seemed that in this case the probability of acceptance is greater. But, as we can see, even such a docked version has not yet been accepted by the Ministry of Defense”, - said Ksenia Goryacheva, deputy chairman of the committee.

According to her, the Ministry of Defense considered that expanding the presidential decree on the postponement "is inappropriate in order to guarantee the mobilization deployment of the RF Armed Forces". She noted that there were no further clarifications.

Pavel Kudyukin, co-chairman of the independent trade union Universitetskaya Solidarity, in an interview with Kommersant, called the Defense Ministry's negative response to the bill "an outrage." He believes that the deferment should apply not only to holders of academic degrees, but also to all teachers without exception.

“There are few men in schools, if they are mobilized, then they will not remain at all. In universities, this will lead to a sharp drop in the quality of education. And it is illogical that the students were given a deferment, but those who teach them were not”, - Kudyukin believes.

He also noted that many universities were able to “knock out” reservations for their teachers. According to him, some research institutes associated with the defense industry also managed to get a lot of “armor” for their employees.