Russian refuzenik?

To follow up on the previous post and the complex question of refusing to serve in the military, a Russian soldier is said to have deserted his regiment in South Ossetia, only to reemerge in a Tbilisi downtown McDonald's in the presence of Gergian Interior Ministry officials. The 21-year-old Alexander Glukhov claimed he had asked asylum. The Russians immediately claimed that he was a prisoner of the Georgians and that his declarations must have been coerced, although that did not seem particularly likely given the ease with which he gave interviews to Reuters. However, interestingly, his grievance seems to have had less to do with the conflict in Ossetia itself or war crimes that may have been committed by Russian forces (although this is unavoidably what Georgians will try to read into it) than the harsh treatment he received within his regiment (specifically that his major beat him).

This is no doubt an interesting and ambiguous case. It is well known that the Russian army is internally very harsh, and several Council of Europe reports have documented the particularly violent treatment that new conscripts can suffer. However, it is not clear that fleeing to the enemy in such cases would be legitimate. From an international asylum law point of view, it might help if Glukhov could show that he was being persecuted on the basis of membership in a group (ethnic or religious for example). Then again, the issue is whether it is the case that Russia could not provide him with an adequate degree of protection if he were to denounce the violence he is a victim of. Glukhov could have deserted and run off to a number of other places, although we do not know whether that was possible in the circumstances.

Nonetheless, it bears stressing that there is a long tradition of army mutinies, not necessarily leading to desertion, in the face of command from officers that was morally particularly abject, rather than because of anything the soldiers might have been asked to do as part of military duties. Perhaps most famously, troops from almost all allied nations at one point or other revolted during the First World War, notably after a series of attacks in 1917 that evidenced a total disregard for human life (as famously portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory).