Soviet soldiers deserting—claim

Press, 1 March 1984, Page 11

Soviet soldiers deserting—claim

NZPA-AP New Haven, Connecticut A demoralised Soviet army in Afghanistan may be having a desertion rate as high as 2 per cent a month, say two former Soviet conscripts in Afghanistan who defected to the United States. “Nobody wants to kill innocent civilians, and the morale of the soldiers in

Afghanistan is extremely low,” Alexander Boranov, aged 19, told a Yale University audience. Mr Boranov and Nicolai Razkov, aged 20, deserted in July last year and spent five months as prisoners of rebels outside Kabul, the Afghan capital. They said that they had received excellent treatment from the rebels, who

smuggled them to Europe along an undisclosed route. Their appearance at Yale was the first public speaking engagement for the two former Soviet soldiers since they reached the United States in December. Speaking through an interpreter, Messrs Boranov and Razkov said that they had witnessed and heard of the machine-gunning of

Afghan civilians, and that the Soviet military routinely bombed non-combatant Afghan villages and massacred their populations without regard to age or sex. But they said that they had never seen or heard of the use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan. Estimates put the Soviet strength in Afghanistan at between 105,000 and 130,000.