Putin backs proposal to allow volunteers with blindness, deafness, schizophrenia, and other severe medical conditions to serve in regional drone-defense units

Filed 1h ago · Via Meduza · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Flight of the Bumblebee

Rimsky-Korsakov — U.S. Air Force Band · Public Domain

Photo: Diplomatic Security Service · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Yevgeny Poddubny, a war correspondent for Russian state broadcaster VGTRK who also heads United Russia's electoral list, asked Vladimir Putin to let volunteers rated Category D, the classification reserved for irreversible conditions like blindness, deafness in both ears, and schizophrenia, serve in regional units defending against drone attacks. Poddubny insisted this was not front-line service but protecting one's own city or workplace, and claimed wounded soldiers themselves were requesting the change.

The request lands amid rumors of a new mobilization wave this fall, which Russian authorities and Putin himself have dismissed as complete nonsense. Category D exists specifically to exempt people from military service entirely, which makes the proposal to route them into anti-drone duty a fairly direct request to unmake that exemption.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

So the category that exists to say “this person cannot serve” is now the recruiting pool. That's a neat trick, and it comes from a state TV man who also happens to be running the ruling party's ticket, which tells you how much of a spontaneous question it was. Anybody swearing up and down there's no new mobilization coming should not, in the same breath, be shopping for people the rulebook already excused.

Source: Read the original at Meduza → Scored: Flight of the Bumblebee · Rimsky-Korsakov — U.S. Air Force Band · CC BY 4.0

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