On How Vitsebsk Region Farms Sabotaging Mobilisation

Military enlistment centres are at a loss.

More than 200 employees of Belarusian agricultural enterprises were brought to administrative responsibility last year for failure to fulfil military transport duty (Article 24.40 of the Code of Administrative Offences of Belarus). Nine such courts were held in Vitsebsk region, says Vitsebsk Courier.

The initiators of considering such cases are military commissions, which need machinery for mobilisation, but the farms do not give them. It is noted that the farms can't provide vehicles because they barely have time to prepare their MAZs, UAZs or ZILs for the agrarian cycle.

There is no one to prepare vehicles for the needs of the army. Therefore, when an employee of the military commission comes to the farm, "the vehicles are either without a passed technical inspection or are not assembled at all".

Representatives of military commissions go to court, but all these trials of agricultural enterprises end either with a warning or a small fine. And the defendants often do not even come to court, but send an application with a request to consider the case in their absence. They call the practice of mobilisation tasks a "casus belli" and believe that the prosecution for failing to fulfill them "clearly does not improve the health of enterprises".

The farms of Vitsebsk region are already suffering from chronic problems: lack of mechanisers and livestock breeders, lack of money and borrowing.