WORLD : 35,000 Evading Soviet Draft
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MOSCOW — The Soviet defense minister said 35,000 young men have evaded the draft this year, most in republics where independence movements have fostered anti-military sentiment, the official Tass news agency reported today.
In addition, more than 4,300 deserters from the army are at large, aided in their flight by local authorities, Tass quoted Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov as saying at a conference of military officials held Wednesday.
Two thousand soldiers died in the first 11 months of 1990, and a quarter of those were suicides, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said in a report on the same conference, citing figures given by Col. Gen. Nikolai Shlyaga, the head of the main political directorate of the armed forces.
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