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At least 58 tons of parcels have been sent in the three months of war from courier service offices in Russian and Belarusian towns near the Ukrainian border by people wearing what looked like the Russian military uniform, Mediazona reports.
On April 3, blogger Anton Motolko published a video of Russian soldiers sending parcels from a SDEK office in Mazyr, Belarus. Although the servicemen could not be identified, nor could it be proven that the equipment and items they sent to Russia had been stolen in Ukraine, the video was the first evidence of alleged looting by the Russian army. After the video was published, Mediazona journalists began monitoring all of SDEK offices on the Ukrainian border.
Having analyzed 18.5 million dispatches, the journalists identified the criteria for suspicious parcels - as a rule, those parcels were sent to cities where military units are located. The total weight of such suspicious parcels was 58 tons. To understand what exactly was being sent in the suspicious parcels, the journalists monitored for several dozen hours what exactly the people wearing what looked like Russian military uniforms were sending from the office in Valuiki, Belgorod region.
Uniformed people were sending sneakers, car tires, a microphone, a TV set, sausages and canned food, a guitar, a tent, and more. One soldier even sent a Russian Orlan-10 drone to an unknown destination.
Most of the parcels were sent by uniformed men to Yurga, Kemerovo Region, where three military units are located: the total weight of the parcels was 5.7 tons. Another 5.6 tons went to Chebarkul, where two tank regiments are stationed.
«To prove that the large volume of parcels does not signify a stable social link between the border town and the Siberian cities, we checked how many parcels went in the opposite direction. About 5.8 tons of parcels went to Yurga from the border, and only 51 kilograms came back. Chebarkul, where more than 5.5 tons of parcels went, sent back less than 10 kilograms over the three months. Not a single parcel came from Kyzyl to the border,» the investigators report.