From the Ministry to the trenches: how officials go to fight as volunteer fighters

Yelena Petrova

How many civil servants went to fight on Ukraine, not reported.

The authorities support the volunteers and promise not only to save their jobs, but to promote them on the career ladder after they return. The volunteer fighters themselves are in no hurry to reveal their names, although they talk about patriotic feelings.

«I have three children. And now I think that they will ask me about the situation in which our country is. When the Motherland is in danger, it is impossible to stand aside», — the newspaper «Amurskaya Pravda» quotes an unnamed employee of the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and Arctic.

The patriotic impulse of civil servants is combined with the program of reducing the state apparatus in the Far East, which Yuri Trutnev announced back in 2020. As Deputy Prime Minister, he set the then plenipotentiary Kozhemyako to reduce the number of officials by 10%.

«When I came to this position, I said that every year we will lay off 10% of the employees of the regional administration, reduce budget expenditures by 10%, and we will direct the released funds to the development of the region. Colleagues said it was impossible and everything would stop. I forced this problem to be solved. The next year, there was less resistance, and then everyone got used to it having to happen that way. And you know, nothing collapsed. The administration worked and solved all the necessary tasks even more efficiently, with less bureaucratic fuss. Therefore, I am sure that we will cope», — the official said.

Sending a whole group of volunteer fighters from among civil servants is a rather rare case in the history of the SMO. But taking into account the fact that this year the Ministry of Defense should put hundreds of thousands of people under arms, such actions will take place not only in the Far East.

Before that, it was more known about the visit of politicians to the call of their own, as it was with the leader of the Just Russians Sergey Mironov or other deputies. The mayor of Petrozavodsk, Vladimir Lyubarsky, who was trained in Chechnya and enrolled in Kadyrov's Akhmat, declared his desire to fight. The head of Vorkuta Yaroslav Shaposhnikov will go to the front. The official told about this in May, and six months before that, he claimed that every tenth goes to fight in Ukraine because his «wife nags».

Now he says that he is going to the zone of his own in a large group of Komi officials:

«In April, I resolved all personal and legal issues — I planned to leave in May. However, from the head of the Komi Republic, Vladimir Viktorovich Uib, who is now essentially my commander, I received a command to postpone departure and go to serve as part of a larger team of colleagues from the Komi Republic».

However, the group of Komi is just being formed, and there is no exact date for sending to the front yet.

In the Kremlin, the initiative of city and regional officials is only supported. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that «due to the departure of mayors to their own cities will not suffer».

Before that, those who had made a mistake on the «citizen» usually loudly declared their participation in hostilities. And criminal cases were immediately closed against them, and sometimes even the criminal investigation was stopped.

So, the head of the Far Eastern city of Bolshoy Kamen, Rustyam Abayashev, was put on the All-Russian wanted list in March for fraud with land and illegal entrepreneurship. And in April, he already announced on VKontakte that he was at the front:

«I made the decision to come here a long time ago, but I felt the urgent need especially when I participated in events for families of the mobilized. This is our homeland, our people, and I want to protect my country and my people».

And already at the end of April, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision on the search, and then on the arrest in absentia.

The media of the Sverdlovsk region covered in detail the case of the former Minister for state Property Management Alexey Pyankov. A few days before the deadline for familiarization with the case, the former official went to fight.

The officials of the Ryazan Region, in the Urals, in the Krasnoyarsk Territory went to the front and received closure of cases at different stages.

As local journalists say, Rustam Abashev serves as a clerk at the headquarters.

However, a variety of specialists are required in the active army.