MOSCOW (Reuters) – Moscow authorities are using the Russian capital’s vast system of facial recognition cameras to track down young men eligible for military service, the state-owned news agency TASS reported on Tuesday, citing the city’s chief enlistment officer.
President Vladimir Putin last week signed a law tightening restrictions on draft evaders and providing for call-up papers to be delivered electronically, rather than in person by an enlistment officer or employer.
The measures will make life harder for thousands of men aged between 18 and 27 who, every spring and autumn, do their best to dodge recruitment officers trying to force them to do their year of compulsory military service, alongside those called up for service in Ukraine under a mobilisation announced last year.
“To determine the place of residence of the conscript, video surveillance systems in the city of Moscow are being used,” Moscow’s chief enlistment officer Maxim Loktev told TASS.
In 2017, Moscow’s Department of Information Technologies said more than 3,000 surveillance cameras in the city had been connected to a facial recognition system.
Russia’s compulsory military service provides a pool of young, trained personnel who can be encouraged or pressured to sign up as professional soldiers as Russia tries to expand its armed forces, having already mobilised at least 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
