“Loaded them up like convicts”. The wife of a man seized in a massive Penza enlistment raid on how he was sent to war against his will

“Well, clearly nothing more important than a hydrangea theft is happening today,” subscribers to the Penza news channel Penzainform joke under a June 18 post about saplings stolen from the embankment. While the city’s news media pages have, as commenters put it, “turned into an ostrich burying its head in the sand,” residents of Penza and the surrounding region are sounding the alarm over large-scale raids targeting men.

“The cops, together with the enlistment office,” are driving around towns in minibuses, “stopping everyone and taking them away,” people warn one another on social media.

“There were traffic police, men in balaclavas and enlistment office staff. They were checking military registration and looking for draft evaders. The questions were mainly for people who had once been sent call-up papers but never reported to the enlistment office. Whether they detained any of them, I don’t know. I didn’t see any detentions myself,” one reader told the outlet Govorit NeMoskva.

In the Sputnik neighbourhood of Penza, police carried out a door-to-door sweep. “They’re grabbing absolutely everyone, stopping cars and public transport, men are being bundled off to sign a contract, there are raids all over the city,” the anti-draft project Get Lost quoted one of its subscribers as saying.

The video that caused the biggest stir on social media was filmed during the night of June 16–17 outside the enlistment office for Penza’s Oktyabrsky and Zheleznodorozhny districts, on Skladskaya Street.

Weeping women have surrounded a minibus in which men sit in silence. One of the women shouts hysterically: “They won’t even give us five minutes [to say goodbye], why won’t you let us?”

The woman filming asks one of the soldiers: “Why didn’t you call an ambulance for the man who’s unwell?” Later she turns to the men in the minibus: “Guys, tell me, did everyone sign a contract voluntarily?” One of them, sitting with his back to the driver, shakes his head. Another woman shouts: “Were you forced? Tell us!”

Halfway through the video the minibus tries to drive off, but it is surrounded, women clinging to it. “Sasha, call the police, please!” one of them shouts, her voice hoarse. “I swear, I’m going to smash this fucking window! Let them go!”

“They made him a new passport, beat him, forced him to sign a contract”. The wife of a Penza man sent to war against his will tells her story

Mediazona tracked down one of the women in the video. Tamara’s husband was on that bus, along with 17 other men.

The couple live in a town in the Penza region. On the morning of June 16, Tamara’s husband set off to visit his elderly parents in another district.

“As he was walking to the bus stop, they caught him: a white Lada Largus car, a bailiffs’ vehicle with a green stripe and ‘FSSP’ written on it,” Tamara says. “He says: ‘On what grounds? Identify yourselves, who are you?’ Nobody identified themselves; they were all in plain clothes, a man, a woman and the driver. They took him to the bailiffs in our town and ran a check on him: no debts, no alimony, no loans.”

The bailiffs then called a taxi and drove him to Penza. On the way, he managed to call his wife.

“I say: ‘Where are they taking you? Put one of them on the phone!’” Tamara recalls anxiously. “Naturally, none of them would take the phone from him. They say: ‘To establish his identity.’ He didn’t have his passport on him, nothing. I say: ‘On what grounds are bailiffs establishing someone’s identity? In that case they should be taking you to the police! Do you understand what’s going on?’ And he goes: ‘I understand what’s going on.’”

When they arrived, Tamara’s husband managed to tell her he had been brought to the enlistment office building, after which contact with him was lost. Her brother, godson and son went straight there too, but at the entrance they were met by “two big guys” who would not let the men inside, she recalls.

A couple of hours later, Tamara took a taxi to Penza herself, but she too was barred from seeing her husband. Meanwhile, relatives of other detained men had begun gathering outside the enlistment office.

“One man from Kamenka they grabbed right at home; his wife was at work and he was in with the child,” Tamara continues. “It all happened in front of the child. Another, from Kuznetsk, went to the passport office to register his address and was told to go to the council building to ‘get a stamp.’ He turned up, and they took him gently by the arm and carted him off.”

After a while, those gathered outside the enlistment office were told they would be allowed a “visit” with their relatives at “around six” in the evening. But six o’clock came and went, then seven, and still no one came out. Tamara did not see her husband until late that night.

“We went in: two rooms, one family in one, another family in the other,” she recalls. “Basically, he told us they’d made him a new passport and cancelled the old one, and that they’d been handed [bank] cards… They beat him, knocked him about, forced him to sign a contract.”

Tamara is convinced that her husband and the other detained men were “intimidated, terrorised and beaten” by the “hulking heavies” she saw in the corridors of the enlistment office. There were no visible marks of a beating on her husband, but he was badly frightened. “The look in his eyes…” she says, crying. “I’d never seen him like that.”

Her husband had never served and certainly had no intention of going to the front, she says: one of his two mobilised relatives was killed, while the other came back seriously wounded.

Closer to midnight, enlistment office staff in Penza led the detained men outside under guard.

“They loaded them up like convicts!” Tamara says, in tears. “We stood [in front of the minibus] and told them: ‘We won’t let you take them!’”

Military police who arrived in response to the call spoke to the men and concluded that they had “signed their contracts voluntarily.” They paid no heed to the outraged relatives.

About three hours later, the men were taken off the bus and brought back inside, and their families were told they would be held at the enlistment office “until morning.” But within minutes those gathered outside realised they had been tricked: the men were led out through a back entrance, put into a Gazelle van and driven off.

On the evening of June 17, Tamara’s husband called to say he was already “in Rostov.” A day later he called again.

“He said: ‘They’ve already kitted us out, we’re in Mariupol’,” she says, crying. “He gave me the number of his military unit and his dogtag number.”

“This is a staged video”. The authorities respond

The Ministry of Defense responded to the reports from Penza only on June 19, when its official Telegram channel reposted a message from the semi-official “War on Fakes” channel that branded those writing about the roundups as “fake news peddlers” and attempted to present the detentions as “raids to identify people who had taken Russian citizenship but failed to register for military service on time.”

“Raids to check military registration” do indeed take place regularly in the region. In August 2025, for example, “11 army draft-dodgers were identified on the roads of Penza,” the local TV channel Express reported.

A report on one such raid in April 2025, billed as a search “for people obliged to register for military service after obtaining Russian citizenship,” was, for some reason, later deleted by the broadcaster.

“Not a single frame or clip of the supposedly beaten men, or of anyone being forced onto buses,” the “War on Fakes” Telegram channel said of the reports from Penza, “unlike the genuine footage of the same kind of work by the TCC”—Ukraine’s military draft offices.

The channel called the talk of forced mobilisation in the region a “fabrication,” set off, it said, by a video “of a confrontation” outside the Penza enlistment office.

“What’s more, the men in uniform behave correctly, and the men on the bus show no sign of being there against their will,” “War on Fakes” wrote.

The regional interior ministry explained the raids in the same terms, as a search for “people who had taken Russian citizenship but failed to register for military service on time.”

Andrei Surkov, the Penza region’s military commissar, the official who heads its enlistment office, went further still, telling Mediazona the video was staged.

“Three women who have nothing whatever to do with this business… If you watched the video properly, the men who were taken, put on the bus and sent off are sitting there smiling at this comedy you were putting on,” he said.

Surkov claimed he even knew “the last names of the people who made this staged video.” But he refused to name them, suggesting that the Mediazona reporter might be “a Ukrainian spy” working “for the SBU,” Ukraine’s security service.

“I assure you there are no roundups and nothing forcible, whatever all your media outlets claim. And I’ll add: foreign-agent media. I’ll be so bold. Foreign-agent media. And all of this will be proven,” the region’s chief military commissar said. (“Foreign agent” is an official Russian designation applied to media outlets and individuals deemed to be under foreign influence.)

The same day, it also emerged that police had drawn up an administrative charge against the Penza blogger Stanislav Morozov for “abuse of freedom of the mass media” after he called the local enlistment office on Skladskaya Street a “torture camp.”

Editor: Anna Pavlova