Ads appear in the Moscow metro promising ‘alternative service’ with no front-line deployment. Recruits still sign standard military contracts.

Filed 1d ago · Via Meduza · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

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Advertisements have appeared near Moscow metro stations offering what they call alternative civilian service, promising a one-time payment of 2.3 million rubles, a standard work schedule, benefits, and no combat deployment, according to independent outlet Vot Tak. The ads, placed by an organization called Zashchitnik.rf, seek communications specialists, IT workers, and drivers for a position near Moscow.

A reporter posing as a candidate was told by a company representative that enrolling requires signing a standard military contract with the Defense Ministry, and was assured deployment to the front “can't happen.” The human rights project Get Lost says this pattern — contract-based positions marketed as safe alternatives to conscription — has previously lured Russians into military service, and stresses genuine alternative civilian service is never arranged through a Defense Ministry contract.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A recruitment pitch that requires signing a military contract while insisting it isn't military service is not alternative anything — it's marketing doing the work bureaucracy won't. The gap between the brochure and the paperwork is exactly where people get sent somewhere they were told they wouldn't go.

Source: Read the original at Meduza → Scored: Bad Ideas (clean) · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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