Free Republic

St. Petersburg lawyer Andrei Nikiforov was drafted into the Russian army four days after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial” mobilization in a bid to solve the military’s manpower problems in the ongoing Ukraine war. Less than two weeks later, Nikiforov became one of the first mobilized men to be killed as Ukraine pushed forward with its successful counteroffensive. “His sister received the draft paper,” Alexander Zelensky, president of the Neva Bar Association of which Nikiforov was a member, told The Moscow Times. “He notified me about it, gathered his belongings the next day and went to the training...

Andrei Nikiforov, a lawyer from St Petersburg, was one of the hundreds of thousands of Russians mobilised since last month to hold the frontlines in his country’s faltering war in Ukraine. On 25 September he received his call-up papers. By 7 October, just two weeks later, he was dead. “We don’t know what happened,” said Alexander Zelensky, the head of the Nevsky Collegium of Lawyers, of which Nikiforov was a member. Zelensky and a member of Nikiforov’s family confirmed his call-up and death. “All we have is a date and a place.” That place was Lysychansk, one of the most...