"Vesti", May 18, 1995, 14:00

Uneducated draftees became a reality. As "Krasnaja Zvezda" newspaper reported today, among 22 young men to be drafted in May - June 1995 on the territory of a village in Sverdlovsk region, eight of draftees have finished only primary school. What one could speak about achieving a military technical speciality before the draft... The subject of army is being continued by our correspondent.

"Nobody knows the exact number of soldiers killed. As well as those dieing from illness. Average number in Russian army is about four thousands per year in peacetime. I think, it does not make any secret for anybody, the figures about losses in warfare given by defence ministry - they speak now about one thousand two hundreds or something like that - this figure is absolutely false. Probably, the losses are not less than ten thousands of persons. We don't mention officers. We don't know nothing about them at all. And I'm afraid, we get to know not soon."

All this facts are the basic arguments for the public organizations in struggle for conscientious objection right, against militarism. Exactly this was the name of today's press conference. According to Nikolaj Khramov, leader of the new-founded Anti-militarist Radical Association, among European countries only Serbia does not have a conscientious objection law. Now the draft of a Russian bill is being prepared for the second reading. However, according to the participants of the press conference, it contains to many concessions to the defence ministry. As Mr. Anatolij Shaklein, representative of the Divine Church of The Last Reign said, the state not abolishing the compulsory military conscription and preserving the old structure of defence ministry, gets all Russia's male population through the elaborated mechanism of general humiliation, more precisely - extermination of human dignity.