Russia's military prosecutors have decided not to launch a probe into claims by a group of Tyvan men mobilized to fight for Russia's armed forces in Ukraine that they were beaten and mistreated.
Andrei Voronkin, an aide to the prosecutor's office of the Russian armed forces contingent in Ukraine, said on February 23 that no evidence had been found to back up the claims made in a video on Telegram in early February by the Tyvan men, who said Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine's Donetsk region beat them severely while saying that they now belong to them.
Less than three weeks ago, the leader of Russia's Republic of Tyva in Siberia, Vladislav Khovalyg, called the situation described by the Tyvan men in the video "a flagrant case that discredits the situation of mobilized men," adding that he had sent his representatives to parts of Ukraine's Russian-occupied Donetsk region to check out the claims.
Neither his office, nor other officials of Tyva, have commented on the visit by Khovalyg's representatives' to the Donetsk region.
In a video posted on Telegram on February 6, the men said they had been mobilized in September and gone through poor military training in the Novosibirsk region, where they were told that they would be serving in a patrolling unit.
The men said they were transferred to the Donetsk region in late December, where they had not been officially registered with any Russian military unit. They said some of them were ordered to fight against Ukrainian forces on the line of contact, which is not what a patrolling unit does.
In recent years, soldiers in the Russian armed forces conscripted from Tyva have complained about race-based bullying because of their ethnicity. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu's father was a Tyvan.