A spokeswoman for the Soldiers’ Mothers, Ella Polyakova, told the BBC that in St Petersburg there was “a network of clients” who would pay for sex with soldiers.
This is - unsurprisingly - coming from an anonymous source at the moment but, given the abuse scandals that regularly disgrace the Russian military, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the claims were true.
Meanwhile, those of you with strong stomachs, English Russia has a post with diagrams of the many and varied types of abuse common in the Russian Army.
February 14th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
If Russia didn’t have Nuclear weapons this would be tragic. But Russia does not really need a strong army because it has TU-160 bombers that can hit any spot on earth and Topol missiles as well as submarines that can destroy 20 cities. Russia conscripts have always been human fodder, they are worth less than a kopek. Look at any point in Russian history. WWI and WWII saw this fodder being almost wholesale slaughtered but Russia still won. It’s called human material and Russia has plenty of it.
February 15th, 2007 at 5:07 am
Hey, that English Russia site straight ripped off those pictures from Bolshoi Gorod. And I blogged about those disturbing diagrams long, long ago - a year ago, to be exact, with a link to the original BG article.
February 15th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Well spotted. I suspect that a lot (probably almost all) of English Russia’s images are from copyrighted sources. I wonder how long before someone sues them. I’ll make a note to correct my piece.
By the way - welcome back Lyndon. Good to see you back blogging again!