Daniel McLaughlin
in Moscow
President Vladimir Putin demanded a full inquiry yesterday into how a conscript died of pneumonia and more than 100 fell ill after being left for hours in light clothes on a freezing runway on their way to serve in a leading regiment of the Russian military.
It is the latest scandal to expose the decrepit state of Moscow's once-mighty armed forces, which are now wracked by a lack of funds for food, training and equipment and suffer alarming rates of suicide and non-combat deaths.
A group of 120 conscripts suffered pneumonia and respiratory infections after being flown to Magadan, a remote former gulag site in the Far East where winter temperatures plunge to -40. Twenty-five of the soldiers were in a serious condition, NTV television reported.
"The conscripts were left on the runway during refuelling, in the wind and freezing cold, and now they are all in hospital," Mr Putin told a gathering of officers from the FSB, the domestic security service that he ran before entering politics.
The conscripts were due to join a regiment of the FSB's border guards, reputedly one of the most efficient and best-equipped units of the embattled Russian military.
Col Vadim Shibayev, a spokesman for the FSB, said the conscripts' problems had begun at the very start of their journey across Siberia to the Pacific coast.
"According to preliminary inquiries, the illness was caused by several errors committed during transportation," he said. "There is information to suggest that the conscripts spent more than a day at Moscow's Chkalovski military airport in unheated accommodation, and even had to sleep on the floor."
In a press release, the FSB - which is investigating the incident with the Ministry of Defence and Prosecutor General - said it would question the officers in charge of each stage of the conscripts' journey.