The military commissar of Russia’s Khabarovsk region was fired after half of the newly mobilized men from his district were deemed unfit for military service, the region’s governor said Monday. The embarrassing episode is the latest humiliation to hit Russia’s first military draft since World War II, which has seen thousands of fighting-age men taking drastic action to avoid being called up. “In 10 days, several thousand of our countrymen received summons and arrived at the military registration and enlistment offices," Mikhail Degtyarev, the governor of the Khabarovsk region in Russia's Far East, said in a video shared on Telegram. “About half of them we returned home as they did not meet the selection criteria for entering the military service.” Degtyarev added that the removal of Yuri Laiko, the commissar, would not affect the broader mobilization plan ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
