Russian IT specialist killed in Ukraine despite being entitled to draft deferment

Timur Izmailov, a former IT specialist for Raiffeisen Bank who was conscripted despite the Russian authorities promising draft deferments for bank IT employees, has been killed by mortar fire in Ukraine, his lawyer, Konstantin Yerokhin, reported on Friday.

Izmailov, who worked with Russia’s Mir payment system, was 33 years old when he died. He was conscripted on September 23, sent into combat on October 7, and killed on October 13.

“We filed more than seven complaints. We filed a lawsuit. We submitted requests to all of the hotlines. Media reports, etc. And this is the outcome,” Yerokhin wrote on Telegram.

According to Yerokhin, as an IT worker at a systemically important bank, Ismailov was entitled to a draft deferment. On September 23, the Russian Defense Ministry declared that employees in the IT, communications, media, and banking sectors would not be subject to mobilization. Yerokhin claims that the Russian Central Bank sent a list of people who should receive deferments to the military’s General Staff on September 28, but that the military commissariat still hasn’t received it. The Defense Ministry and the Russian military prosecutor’s office told Yerokhin that they don’t have any information about Yerokhin.

Izmailov’s sister, Anna, previously reported that her brother was asked to come to the military commissariat to update his documents on September 18, three days before Putin’s mobilization announcement. When he showed up on September 22, he was given a summons for military training, and on September 23, his military ID was taken and he was conscripted.

According to Anna Izmailova, on the day Timur was drafted, nobody in the family had time to gather all of the documents necessary to prove he was entitled to a deferment. “As of today, we have all of the documents confirming his right to a deferment,” she said on October 3. “When we showed up at the military commissariat with these documents, the military commissar said in an aggressive manner that the documents don’t mean anything, that ‘there’s nothing we can do,’ and that since he had already been mobilized, he was going to serve.”

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