Russians fleeing to avoid Putin’s war
KYIV: Moscow began its mandatory troop call-up on Thursday (local time) to try to bolster a stumbling war effort in Ukraine, with authorities saying thousands had volunteered even as Russian men fled the country to avoid being forced to fight.
Amateur footage posted on social media since President Vladimir Putin ordered the mobilisation of reservists on Wednesday purported to show hundreds of Russian citizens responding to military summons.
The call-up comes as Moscow-held regions of Ukraine are to vote on whether to become part of Russia in referendums that have been called an illegal land grab by Kyiv.
The Russian military said at least 10,000 people had volunteered to fight in the 24 hours since the order, but men also left Russia before they were made to join.
Flights out of Russia to neighbouring countries, mainly former Soviet republics that allow Russians visafree entry, are nearly entirely booked and prices have skyrocketed, pointing to an exodus of Russians wanting to avoid going to war.
“I don’t want to go to the war,” a man named Dmitri, who had flown to Armenia with just one small bag, said at the country’s Yerevan airport. “I don’t want to die in this senseless war.”
Military-aged men made up the majority of those arriving off the latest flight from
Moscow at the airport and many were reluctant to speak.
The Armenian capital has become a major destination for Russians fleeing since war began on February 24. And in Russia itself there have been protests against the mobilisation, with more than 1300 people arrested across the country on Wednesday, a monitoring group reported.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday demanded Mr Putin be held to account as he faced Russia in a Security Council session in which the United Nations catalogued abuses in Ukraine.
“We cannot – we will not – let President Putin get away with it,” Mr Blinken said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out at the accusations. “There’s an attempt today to impose on us a completely different narrative about Russian aggression as the origin of this tragedy,” Mr Lavrov told the Security Council.
The confrontation on the diplomatic stage escalated as Kremlin-installed officials in Ukrainian regions controlled by Moscow’s forces vowed on Thursday to press ahead with the annexation polls this week.
Four Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine – Donetsk and Lugansk in the east and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south – said they would hold the votes over five days, beginning on Friday.
Western leaders convening in New York this week unanimously condemned the ballots.
Speaking at the UN, US President Joe Biden accused Mr Putin of “shamelessly” violating the UN Charter with a war aimed at “extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist”.
The integration of the warscarred regions into Russia would represent a major escalation of the conflict, as Moscow could then try to say it was defending its own territory from Ukrainian forces.
After the votes were announced by his proxy officials in Ukraine, Mr Putin announced that Russia would call up some 300,000 reservists to bolster the war effort and cautioned that Moscow would use “all means” to protect its territory.