RIGA, Latvia — In just two days since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced mobilization to support his ailing war in Ukraine, thousands of men have been hounded by recruiters, in some cases rounded up in the middle of the night and rushed onto buses loaded and aircraft to be sent for military training and presumably to be used at the front.
And despite assurances from the authorities of a “partial” mobilization, limited to reservists with prior military experience, the initial random call-up process has sparked fears that Putin is attempting to activate far more troops than the 300,000 Shoigu initially indicated by Russian Defense Minister Sergei.
“Here is just hell; they grab everyone,” wrote a resident of Sosnovo-Ozerskoye, a rural settlement of about 6,000 people in eastern Siberia’s Buryatia region near Russia’s border with Mongolia, to Victoria Maldeva, an activist with the Free Buryatia Foundation, which has collected hundreds of reports about mass mobilization.
“Drunk men who are due to leave the same day roam the town square,” wrote the resident of Sosnovo-Ozerskoye. “Everyone knows everyone here. This is unbearable. Women cry and chase the bus, and men beg forgiveness before they leave, knowing they are certain to die.”
The Free Buryatia Foundation and similar activists working in Yakutia, another remote, impoverished region of Russia in northeastern Siberia, said they were concerned the mobilization was disproportionately targeting ethnic minorities living in those areas, many thousands of miles away away from Moscow.
“When it comes to Buryatia, this is not a partial mobilization, this is a full mobilization,” Free Buryatia Foundation head Alexandra Garmazhapova said in a TV interview. “And it amazes me how people who know how much Vladimir Putin likes to lie believed that this will be a partial mobilization.”
Garmazhapova said her volunteers stayed up all night Wednesday and Thursday to help men, some as old as 62, who were woken by schoolteachers who were forced to go door-to-door in Buryat villages at night and deliver notifications.
The human rights activists said they believe Russian military recruiters are focusing their efforts in rural and remote areas rather than in big cities like Moscow or St. Petersburg because a lack of media and protest activity makes it easier for them to push through recruiting orders and around the to placate regional leaders who want to curry favor with Putin. The Asian ethnic populations of Siberia and the Russian Far East are also less likely to have personal and family ties to Ukraine.
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In Moscow, however, recruiters found a new source of readily available recruits: protesters arrested at anti-war rallies this week. A reporter from SOTA Vision, Artem Kriger, was arrested on Wednesday as he was wrapping up a live broadcast from one of the capital’s central streets.
Later, at the police station, Kriger and more than a dozen other men arrested with him were issued summonses ordering them to report to their local military commissaries. On Friday, Kriger was also sentenced to eight days in prison after a judge found him guilty of attending an unauthorized rally.
Military analysts say it’s far from clear that Russia’s military setbacks can be reversed simply by sending hundreds of thousands of new fighters to the front lines. Russia is also running out of weapons and other supplies and has lost several commanders in the nearly seven-month war.
The initial bewilderment and confusion at the mobilization effort, and public anger, confirmed the risk of a societal backlash that had led Putin to resist imposition of conscription until recent setbacks made it clear that Russia was in danger of being defeated. However, according to experts, a large number of untrained, unmotivated and poorly equipped soldiers is unlikely to be able to reverse Russia’s losses.
Several videos posted online Friday morning showed busloads of agitated and apparently intoxicated men who had received draft notices and were fighting. The videos, which could not be independently verified, highlighted the potential lack of morale and discipline among Russia’s newest fighters.
In Dagestan, a Muslim-majority region in the North Caucasus, where Russian media reported the official goal was to gather 13,000 men into conscription offices, a group of men confronted with a local recruiter, a woman who tried to shame them , engaged in a rowy fight over his unwillingness to join the war effort.
“These children will fight for their future,” the woman called out to a group of about 30 men gathered outside a local police station. according to a clip Posted from the “Observers of Dagestan” movement.
“What future? We don’t even have a present,” one of the men called back. “Go and fight yourself if you want. We are not!”
At another recruitment station in the small town of Yekaterinoslavka in the far eastern Amur region, northeast of the Russian-Chinese border, an officer shouted at a group of angry, disgruntled men who had been summoned. “Why are you crying like little girls,” the officer told an angry crowd, according to secretly recorded video. “Playtime is over. You are all soldiers now.”
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Russia’s Defense Ministry on Friday tried to ease the chaos and anger in the country by sending “clarifications” to state news outlets about who qualified for conscription. But that did little to quell the panic as multiple reports surfaced of men who qualified for exemptions but still received a subpoena.
Pavel Chikov, head of the human rights group Agora, which helps Russians find legal ways to avoid military service, reported several cases in which men over the stated mobilization age of 55 had received a subpoena.
“The Ministry of Defense has been busy for two days in a row calming down the population,” Chikov posted on his Telegram channel. “But it is important that these ‘official statements’ are only the work of the press service and not actual decrees, all of which are for official use and secret.
“The district military commissars do not read telegrams, they receive lists from headquarters, and they will continue to fill buses, collection points and planes with people,” he wrote.
Alexander Dorzhiev, 38, from Ulan-Ude, a city in Buryatia about 150 miles from the border with Mongolia, received a notification Wednesday morning and was told to show up at a local recruitment station at 4 a.m. the next day and leave his hometown just hours later.
As the father of five young children, Dorzhiev was supposed to be exempt from military service under Russian law. Amid public uproar, Buryatia Governor Alexey Tsydenov said 70 fathers who should have been exempted were summoned but later released from the commissariats.
Children from Kharkiv went to a summer camp in Russia. They never came back.
The chaos drew sharp criticism even from some supporters of the Putin government.
“This only shows the quality of our recruitment offices’ work,” pro-Kremlin journalist and politician Andrei Medvedev wrote on Telegram, criticizing the mobilization process in Russia. “This leads to panic in the rear, hysterical moods and massive social tensions. Mobilization should strengthen the army, not cause insurrection.”
Adding to the national panic was the Kremlin’s admission that a secret paragraph in the mobilization decree signed by Putin on Wednesday concerned the number of troops Russia intends to call up.
Novaya Gazeta Europe reported Thursday, citing a source in the presidential administration, that the clause provides for the activation of 1 million people. Another Russian outlet, Meduza, reported the number could be as high as 1.2 million. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called both reports “a lie” but gave no corrected numbers.
Pro-Kremlin bloggers and Instagram accounts launched a hashtag #NoToPanic on Russian social media platforms. They issued nearly identical posts, insisting that “only 1 percent of reservists will be called up” – in a seemingly coordinated effort to debunk reports that the actual recruitment target is well over 300,000.
“Would a fries be enough to fill you up? I think everyone would say no, that’s only 1 percent of your share,” blogger Anna Belozerova wrote on VKontakte, a Russian social networking platform. “You guessed right, I’m talking about a mobilization that everyone is panicking about. We must all remain calm! There will only be 300,000 people, 1 percent reservists.”
Still, Russians seeking to avoid military service continued to flock to the country’s borders, fearing that even if they were spared this week, they could be caught up in the next wave of mobilizations.
With flights almost completely sold out, most are crossing land borders by car or on foot, although the possibility of escaping to Europe seemed too slim. Finland, the only remaining EU land border open to Russians, said Friday it will bar Russians on tourist visas from crossing the border in the next few days.
Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia contributed to this report.
War in Ukraine: What you need to know
The newest: Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” of troops in a Sept. 21 address to the nation, describing the move as an attempt to defend Russian sovereignty against a West trying to use Ukraine as a tool to “divide and destroy Russia”. .” Follow our live updates here.
The fight: A successful Ukrainian counter-offensive has forced a major Russian retreat in the northeastern Kharkiv region in recent days, as troops fled towns and villages they had occupied since the early days of the war, leaving behind large quantities of military equipment.
Annexation Referendums: According to Russian news agencies, staged referendums that would be illegal under international law are to be held in the breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine from September 23-27. Another staged referendum will be held by the Moscow-appointed government in Kherson starting Friday.
Photos: Washington Post photographers have been on the ground since the war began – here is some of their most impressive work.
How can you help: Here are ways people in the US can help support the people of Ukraine, as well as what people around the world have donated.
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