A brief analysis of the court proceedings for conscription evasion in Crimea 

Since the occupation of Crimea, the Russian power has spread the effect of its legislation [on the territory of Crimea] as well as automatically vested the residents of this territory with its citizenship. In line with Russian legislation, males of a certain age, being the nationals of the RF, shall be conscripts of the Russian army. Failure to adhere to the conscription notice by the military commissary [to appear] within the stipulated term with no good reasons or failure to come to the gathering point to be sent to the military unit shall be a crime.

The International humanitarian law shall clearly ban from conscripting the civilians of the occupied territory to the occupying army. Compelling the nationals of the other party to take part in the operations of war directed against their own country shall be a war crime in line with the Rome Statute. We consider the court proceedings for evasion of military service in the Russian army by the residents of Crimea to be one of the forms of compelling, therefore, to be a war crime.   

Since the occupation of Crimea [by Russia] and up until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Crimean courts considered 234 criminal cases under the charges of conscription evasion. Since 24 February 2022 and up to date, the courts have considered or considered 259 criminal cases. Analysing the statistics by year, it should be noted that the number of court proceedings had been constantly growing up until the full-scale invasion, and within three recent years, the number of these proceedings has been decreasing.

Taking into account the general worsening of the human rights situation on the occupied territory of Crimea, such a decrease is hardly due to criminally non-proceeding by law-enforcement structures of the residents who evade the military service. Probably such factors as the significant growth of Russian propaganda, outflow of the males of the conscription age from the region as well as repressive measures to frighten the population have led to the general decrease of the number of “evaders”, therefore, to decrease of the court proceedings under the Article 328 of the Criminal Code of the RF.

While examining the case law in Crimea, the criminal cases against the same person initiated repeatedly in one to two years intervals raise particular interest. Ten persons were criminally charged repeatedly in a one-two years interval under Article 328, and there was one case of charging the resident for this crime on 3 occasions – in 2020, 2022 and 2024.

103 judges of all courts established on the peninsula considered the cases against the residents of the occupied Crimea for the conscription evasion, except the Chernomorsky District Court and Balaklava District Court of the city of Sevastopol which considered no single case under the Article 328 of the Criminal Code of the RF.  

The absolute leader of the conscription evasion cases is Sergey DEMENOK, the judge of the Central District Court of the city of Simferopol, who adopted 46 decisions (which is 9,3%  of all decisions concerned). Besides, the top five judges within the same category of cases are Viktor MOZHELYANSKY (19 cases), Olga PAVLIUKOVA (18 cases), Vadim VERESKUN (17 cases) and Aleksandr SERDIUK (16 cases). Vadim VERESKUN, the judge of the Lenin District Court of Crimea, is the only one who was appointed after the occupation of the peninsula; four other judges are former Ukrainian judges who are criminally charged with state treason or sentenced in absentia.

This article is the property of the Crimean Process. The version of this article in Russian is here.