General Staff orders to investigate facts of abuse of military in one of the Armed Forces units
16 December 2024 17:14
According to the decision of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, a commission of the Military Law Enforcement Service was sent to the 211th Pontoon Bridge Brigade of the Armed Forces Support Forces to check the facts of possible abuse. This was reported by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, "Komersant Ukrainian" informs.
At the same time, the General Staff recalls the material published in the media on December 16, 2024, which highlights the facts of possible abuses by officials of the 211th Pontoon and Bridge Brigade of the Support Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
In fact, we are talking about an article by Ukrayinska Pravda entitled “An Engineer Family. Mockery of the military, extortion, nepotism and other secrets of the 211th Pontoon and Bridge Brigade”.
According to the General Staff, the commander of the military unit has been suspended from duty for the duration of the inspection. They also promised to inform about the course and results of the inspection in accordance with the procedure established by the legislation of Ukraine.
At the same time, the General Staff emphasized that “an internal audit was already conducted in September of this year on some of the above facts and, based on its results, materials were collected and submitted to the competent authorities, where the relevant criminal proceedings were initiated.”
This story of military bullying was also brought to the attention of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, who sent letters to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Military Law Enforcement Service to verify the information and conduct an internal investigation for further response, and also took the situation under his personal control and promised to report on the results of the investigation.
What is described in the UP material
The subject of the journalists’ investigation was the scandalous situation in one of the Armed Forces brigades, where the military were mocked, beaten, and extorted money.
Citing the military, the publication reported that it was the 211th Pontoon and Bridge Brigade of the Armed Forces Support Forces. The soldiers told journalists on condition of anonymity that in order for officers not to record any violations and not to draw up a protocol, the military had to pay from 5 to 20 thousand hryvnias. Those who disagreed were threatened with transfer to the infantry.
The soldiers reported that the commander of one of the platoons in the first battalion, Vladyslav Pastukh, the son of the chief of staff and godson of the brigade, most often beat his subordinates and extorted money. The Ombudsman’s Office also obtained reports and statements from the victims.
One of the soldiers said that he drank alcohol while on rotation in Dnipropetrovs’k and Donetsk regions, for which he was repeatedly physically punished by Senior Lieutenant Vladyslav Pastukh.
“They also tied me to a wooden cross and physically abused me,” the soldier said. This gruesome photo was also sent to the editorial office.
The publication reports that after the online resonance, Pastukh Jr. was simply transferred to another unit, and his father paid the military who suffered. Instead of punishing the perpetrators fairly, the brigade command transferred almost all of the military involved in the internal investigation to infantry units.
“Ukrayinska Pravda also draws attention to the fact that in the eleventh year of the war with Russia, the Ukrainian military remains unprotected. And, as the example of the 211th Pontoon and Bridge Brigade of the Armed Forces Support Forces shows, soldiers can face threats not only at the front, but also in the units where they serve. The Ombudsman’s Secretariat, in response to a request from UP, reported that in eleven months of 2024, soldiers sent 3807 appeals regarding violations of their rights, of which about a third were complaints about military units.
