MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. Ukrainian soldiers are executed in front of their units for leaving combat positions, while there is nothing like this in the Russian Armed Forces, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with members of the Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights (HRC) on Wednesday.
"Regarding those who leave positions: in Ukraine, as you know, soldiers are shot on the spot. Even mass executions are carried out, in public, in front of the military unit," Putin said, stressing that this was not a secret and many such cases were well known.
Putin dismissed as nonsense allegations about camps for deserters in Russia.
"We have nothing of the kind, we don’t have any such camps, zones, and so on. This is all nonsense, these are falsehoods that that have no basis to rely on," he added.