An alarming video has emerged showing what appears to be a Russian military conscript asking a friend to break his arm with a sledgehammer to dodge the draft into the war with Ukraine.
The recording, which The Post could not independently authenticate, opens with the would-be draftee sitting down and stretching out his left arm on a bench, while his pal raises the large hammer to bash the limb.
The friend takes a swing and brings the sledgehammer down onto the conscript’s arm with a thud, before letting out a profanity and scurrying away.
The shirtless conscript stands up and groans in pain, his left arm hanging limply at his side.
“Kolyan, is everything all right?” the sledgehammer-wielding man asks off camera.
A woman asks the friend why he ran away.
The conscript is heard saying his pal told him he would break his arm. But after the woman inspects the man’s arm, she says it doesn’t appear to be broken.
The friend then chimes in, asking: “What do you mean it’s not f—ing broken?”
It’s unclear from the video if the hammer strike actually did what the conscript hoped for.
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced last week that he was mobilizing at least 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine, there have been reports of military-age men deliberately maiming themselves to avoid the draft.
Two hours after Putin’s saber-rattling speech, Google searches for “how to break an arm at home” soared across the nation, quickly rising from a rating of 0 to 38, out of 100, in the search engine’s trend data, according to Newsweek.
