The leader of Russia's Republic of Tyva in Siberia, Vladislav Khovalyg, has sent his representatives to parts of Ukraine's Russia-occupied Donetsk region after a group of Tyvan men mobilized to fight with the Russian armed forces invading Ukraine complained of ill treatment.
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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 will serving in a patrolling unit.
According to the men, they were transferred to the Donetsk region in late December, where they had not been officially registered with any Russian military unit, while some of them were ordered to fight against Ukrainian forces on the line of contact, which is not what a patrolling unit does.
The men also said Russian-backed separatists from the Donetsk region, as well as military police, came to them and beat them severely while saying that they now belong to them.
"In that case, we are not soldiers of the Russian Federation," the men said in the video.
Footage also showed two men in military uniform forcing a third man to kneel as they put the barrel of an assault rifle to his head. It is not clear who is in the footage and when the video was shot.
Khovalyg called the situation "a flagrant case that discredits the situation of mobilized men," adding that he already talked to the leader of Russia-backed separatists in Donetsk, Vitaliy Khotsenko, regarding the situation before sending his representatives to the Russia-controlled part of Donetsk.
Tyva's former leader, Sholban Kara-Ool, also issued a statement on January 6, saying he had canceled a business trip across Siberia and would urgently travel to Donetsk to personally look into the situation.
In recent years, soldiers in the Russian armed forces conscripted from Tyva complained about race-based bullying because of their ethnicity, as Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu's father was a Tyvan.
Tyvans (Tuvinians) are a Turkic-speaking ethnic group of some 308,000 people, mainly residing in the remote republic on the Russian-Mongolian border.