Servicemen fight with villagers in Stavropol Territory

At night on July 18, in the village of Sernovodskoe, Kursk District of the Stavropol Territory, a conflict burst out between servicemen of the 58th Army of the Southern Military District of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and local residents, which escalated into a fight.

The data on the number of victims and participants of the conflict are contradictory. According to the militaries, nobody suffered in the conflict. According to the prosecutor's office, two locals received bodily injuries.

"Soldiers of a unit of the 18th Motorized Infantry Brigade, stationed in Chechnya, who were at a field mission near the village of Sernovodskoe, went in two cars to fetch water for the needs of the unit. A verbal dispute burst out between the militaries and locals, which developed into a brawl. The party stopped the fight by their own, without involvement of investigators or other law enforcers. As a result of the incident no one was hurt," the GTRK (State TV and Radio Company) "Stavropolye" quotes Oleg Kochetkov, the deputy head of press service of the Southern Military District.

Locals claim that the militaries had initiated the conflict.

"When 20 soldiers from the military unit came to take water from a standpipe, they decided to take a shower there. Seeing that soldiers were undressing, the locals who passed by made a remark that caused a rather aggressive reaction of the soldiers," the "Vesti.ru" quotes Mikhail Yusupov, the head of the rural settlement Sernovodskoe.

To split the soldiers and local residents, several law enforcement bodies, including the FSB, were attracted, the "Life News" reports.

Law enforcement bodies have established all the participants of the mass brawl between soldiers and locals in the village of Sernovodskoe, Stavropol Territory. According to official sources, in total, nine persons were fighting.

"At present, disciplinary measures have been applied to the soldiers involved; all the deployed soldiers are prohibited from moving outside the ground and use of private transport. The fact of inflicting bodily injuries to two local residents is checked by the Kursk ROVD (District Interior Division)," says the official website of the Prosecutor's Office of the Stavropol Territory.

"Nobody applied to the police, and no one turned for medical care; therefore, there's no reason talking about a mass brawl in this case," the "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" quotes Eugeny Arnautov, the head of the press service of the Chief Department of the Russian MIA for the Stavropol Territory, as saying.