Residents of Russia’s Penza region say people in plainclothes are trying to abduct men and force them into military service

Roundups targeting men of conscription age are continuing in the Penza region, now carried out by plainclothes individuals connected to local authorities, the independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo reported.

Penza blogger Stanislav Morozov published video showing two attempted abductions of men in the settlement of Bashmakovo, in the Penza region, both carried out by people in civilian clothes.

The first incident took place on July 23 and involved Sergei Teplyakov, an employee of a private security company. He said one of the men introduced himself as a new police officer. When Teplyakov called the actual local officer, the men tried to drag him out through his gate by force. They left only after Teplyakov’s son began filming the confrontation.

According to Teplyakov, no one in the settlement knew the men who tried to take him. He recognized only one, a former police officer and Bailiff Service employee named Kasavkin.

In the second case, Alexei Denisenko, a salesman at a gas equipment store, was nearly taken to Penza. He said he was mowing grass in a local park on July 22 — part of a 240-hour mandatory labor sentence — when two men approached and demanded he come with them, threatening that otherwise “it will be worse.”

The men put Denisenko into a car where a settlement administration employee was sitting. She told him he was being taken to the administration building “to clarify information,” but the car ended up heading to Penza instead. A relative of Denisenko’s caught up with the car near a neighboring village and fought off the attempt to take him away. “The car didn’t stop right away, I honked and cut it off. Then I got out of the car and took him,” she told Agentstvo.

Teplyakov and Denisenko both filed police reports. Their relatives said vehicles belonging to the local administration were used in the roundups — a detail Agentstvo confirmed through leaked information.

After these incidents, Bashmakovo residents formed an informal group to respond to roundups and fight off attempts to take people away, sources told the outlet. Police have since summoned some of the group’s members and threatened to send them to fight in the Russia–Ukraine war.

Reports of mass roundups targeting men of conscription age in the Penza region first emerged in mid-June, with residents forcibly taken away and pressured into signing military service contracts.

The Penza military commissar dismissed as staged the social media videos showing women fighting off attempts to take their relatives away in minibuses. The region’s Internal Affairs Ministry has called reports of the roundups false, though local residents say the raids are continuing.

In response, Penza residents created a channel to share news about the roundups. Police have threatened them with legal consequences for spreading “false information.”