More and more Russian restaurants are refusing to let in rowdy soldiers who have returned from the war in Ukraine.
– The soldiers fight with knives and assault people, says an employee.
Thousands of Russian soldiers have returned from the front in Ukraine, many of them with post-traumatic stress disorder. They are short-tempered, and often get into fights.
The testimonies of menacing soldiers are many. 25-year-old Tatjana in Siberian Ulan Ude tells about the meeting with a war veteran in a cafe.
She was sitting talking with a friend when a drunken man in camouflage clothing, with orders on his chest and a large scar on his face came up to their table. Tatjana’s dismissive attitude really pissed him off:
– He shouted that “we wriggle in the trenches, shed our blood for you, and you sit here and think you are somebody!”. He swore, his eyes were completely bloodshot and he shouted to his friends: “Look at this pile of shit. I was sitting in the trenches and she dissed me,” Tatjana tells the newspaper Nastoyazhcheye Vremya.
In the end, a security guard arrived and the two friends were able to leave the place unharmed, but thoroughly shaken. Nowadays, she hardly dares to move herself on the city streets:
– There are so many such beasts. They can bring themselves to attack with a knife, or rape, or do whatever…
The examples of easily provoked soldiers who started fights have increased over time.
In September 2022, a soldier in uniform entered a pizzeria in Tula, south of Moscow. When another restaurant guest began to argue with him, the soldier turned to the restaurant owner and said that he had just returned from the front.
– Ever since then, replied the restaurant owner.
Then the soldier left, but only to fetch a friend. When they returned, the soldier took a chair and began beating the restaurant owner with it.
Last November, ten soldiers and regulars at the Grabli tavern in the Siberian city of Jurga began throwing chairs and tables at each other after a verbal argument. Everything was caught by a surveillance camera. A soldier was injured in the calabash and taken to hospital, according to The Insider magazine.
An employee of the restaurant Vega in Novosibirsk, which no longer admits soldiers in uniform, tells Nastoyashchei Vremya:
– When they come here, they always cause trouble. The soldiers fight with knives and assault people. That’s why they don’t come in here.
In the comment fields on various Russian sites, soldiers express their frustration at not being allowed into restaurants. One notes that “bald, injured, scarred faces” are stopped, and wonders if soldiers on leave from the war “have to look like Brad Pitt” to get in.
Other Russians think it goes without saying that they should be ported:
– First they should brag about being at the front. Then they start arguing, slapping the table neighbor who hasn’t been to Ukraine. Then they turn on their girlfriend, accusing her of having left with the table neighbor. And then they overturn the tables and break all the crockery…
Many of the country’s top politicians defend the returning soldiers, not ordinary Russians who suffer from their violence. When more and more restaurants began to host soldiers, the speaker of the Russian parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, proposed a law that restaurants that do not admit soldiers should be closed.
Russian media sometimes follow the politicians’ line, and defend the soldiers. When a uniformed soldier did not enter a bar in Voronezh in June of this year, the Russia Today TV channel published a surveillance video of the incident. Then the bar owner was forced to apologize for stopping the soldier.