Who and what breeds hazing

23 2010 June 1

The leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation sees among the main reasons for bullying in the army the influence of youth groups of an extremist type.

Deputy Defense Minister Nikolai Pankov at a joint meeting of the collegiums of the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Sport and Tourism and the Ministry of Education and Science said: “According to open sources, there are 150 extremist youth groups in Russia. Their participants live in large cities. But the danger of the spread of this negative phenomenon to medium and small cities, other settlements is very likely. The acquired communication skills in informal youth groups inevitably come to military groups and, by the way, this is one of the main reasons for the non-statutory manifestations of the so-called hazing. ”

The crime rate among conscripts from Buryatia, North Ossetia, Nizhny Novgorod, Kaliningrad, Saratov regions, Perm and Primorsky Territories remains consistently high annually. In the Nizhny Novgorod and Yaroslavl regions, almost every tenth crime is caused by minor citizens. There are frequent cases of unlawful acts of servicemen who committed similar crimes before being drafted for military service. During 2009 and the first five months of this year, about 270 of such cases were recorded.

The concern of the military causes the poor health of draftees. 64% of secondary school students do not regularly engage in sports, about 7% do not attend physical education classes and only less than 3% of students from 42 regions have sports classes. At the same time, the standards for physical training of school graduates are significantly lower than that required in the Armed Forces.

Over the past two decades, the number of fit for military service of young people has decreased by almost a third. Moreover, the 30% of the conscripts' health and physical fitness level do not meet the requirements of the military service. “As a result of this situation, unprepared people come to the ranks of the Armed Forces, and already in the army we have to train, educate, heal, restore and develop physical health, and sometimes simply fatten them up, providing normal, wholesome nutrition,” the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation said Yuri Chaika.

The Russian Defense Ministry is also sounding the alarm: more and more young people cannot be drafted into the army due to the fact that they use drugs. In the 2009 year, more than three thousand young people have been recognized as eligible or unfit for military service. The most alarming situation was in Bashkiria, Amur, Kemerovo, Sverdlovsk, Moscow regions and Krasnodar Krai. According to the Federal Drug Control Service of the Russian Federation, there are several million drug addicts in Russia.

By the way, taking drugs in the Urals has become a popular way of evading urgent service. Recently, 100 draftees immediately arrived at the assembly point in Egorshino under the "high".

The party of 100 drug addicts, even if they used the potion only once, has already caused a reaction in the PUVO and the regional military enlistment office. An emergency telephone message was sent to all the commissariats and recruiting stations with a list of the localities that had put out unprofitable conscripts in Yegorshino. The championship in this list is kept by Nizhny Tagil - from there nine lovers of drugs arrived at once. Next - Chkalovskaya, Verkh-Isetskaya and the Railway Commission, each of which sent seven such young people. From Pervouralsk and Sysert came six drug-intoxicated conscripts. Similar cases were noted among the contingent from the October and Lenin districts of Yekaterinburg.

Young people once used marijuana in the hope that they would be recognized as addicted and released from military service. As a rule, such recruits are returned back to their city and an additional medical examination is ordered. There they are undergoing rehabilitation.

Along with drugs, there is another problem - alcohol. Recently, in Blagoveshchensk, more than 50 people gathered at the gates of the military registration and enlistment office - recruits, their relatives and friends, many were drunk. There was a conflict, which then turned into a mass brawl. To ensure public order had to call a private security attire.