Russia: Forced recruitment raids reported in Penza

Penza raids: military commissar calls them 'comedy', videos show arrests

While Penza's military commissar, Andrey Surkov, dismisses the recordings showing men being forcibly detained as "comedy" and "staged videos", testimony from wives and residents describes a systematic forced recruitment operation. In a video from June 16, a woman recounts how her husband was pushed into a minibus with 18 other men and forced to sign a contract under threats to his family. "If your vvife goes anywhere else again, your family will suffer", they told him, according to Natalia Sukhova.

The raids are said to have spread to every district of Penza. On June 18, in Spassk, the National Guard and military commissariats arrested single men on the street and then carried out door-to-door visits, even knocking down a door. The detainees were loaded into vans and nothing more was heard of them. The witness who filmed the scene said "there is no one left to help, they took them all away".

The most recent case dates from September 26, 2025. A man named Vasily, a father, was approached by three individuals —two in civilian clothes and one in uniform— while having coffee in Ulyanovsky Park. After showing a police certificate, they put him in a car on the pretext of verifying his identity. His sister reported that thirty other men were abducted that same day.

The pattern echoes the practice used in Ukraine to recruit men exempt from mobilization, where they are forced to sign contracts without going through enlistment offices. The question that remains is whether these practices, denied by the authorities, will become the new Russian norm for covering frontline losses.