‘They are grabbing everyone’
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced mobilisation to help his ailing war in Ukraine, thousands of men have been chased down by recruiters, in some cases rounded up in the middle of the night, and swiftly loaded on to buses and planes to be sent off for military training and, presumably, deployment to the front lines.
And despite assurances by the authorities of a ‘‘partial’’ mobilisation, limited to reservists with prior military experience, the initial haphazard call-up process has sparked fears that Putin is trying to activate far more soldiers than the 300,000 initially stated by Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.
‘‘It’s just hell here – they are grabbing everyone,’’ a resident of Sosnovo-Ozerskoye, a rural settlement of about 6000 people in the eastern Siberian region of Buryatia near Russia’s border with Mongolia, wrote to Victoria Maldeva, an activist with the Free Buryatia Foundation who has collected hundreds of reports about mass mobilisation.
‘‘Everyone knows each other here. This is impossible to bear. Women are crying, chasing the bus, and men pleaded for forgiveness before they left, as they know they are facing certain death.’’
The Free Buryatia Foundation and similar activists working in Yakutia, another remote, impoverished region in northeastern Siberia, said they were concerned that the mobilisation was disproportionately targeting ethnic minorities living in those
areas, thousands of kilometres from Moscow.
Rights workers said they believed that recruiters were focusing their efforts on rural and remote areas, rather than big cities like Moscow or St Petersburg, because a lack of media outlets and protest activity made it easier for them to enforce recruitment orders and to appease the regional leaders seeking to curry favour with Putin.
The Asian ethnic populations of Siberia and the Russian Far East are also less likely to have
personal and family connections to Ukraine.
Large numbers of untrained, unmotivated and ill-equipped soldiers are unlikely to reverse Russia’s losses, experts say.
Several videos posted online show busloads of agitated, and apparently drunk, men who have received call-up notices brawling, highlighting the potential lack of morale and discipline of Russia’s newest fighters.
The Russian Defence Ministry yesterday sought to ease the chaos and anger
gripping the country by sending out ‘‘clarifications’’ to state-run news outlets on who qualified for the call-up. But this has done little to quell the panic, with multiple reports emerging of men who qualified for exemptions nonetheless receiving summonses.
The chaos has brought sharp criticism even from some supporters of Putin’s government. ‘‘This just shows the quality of the way our enlistment offices work,’’ proKremlin journalist and politician Andrey Medvedev wrote on Telegram. ‘‘This leads to panic in the rear, hysterical moods and massive social tension. Mobilisation should strengthen the army, not cause upheaval.’’
Russians seeking to avoid military service are continuing to flock to the country’s borders, fearing that even if they are spared this week, they might be ensnared in the next mobilisation wave.
With flights almost entirely sold out, most are crossing land borders by car or on foot, although the opportunities to escape to Europe are narrowing. Finland, the only remaining European Union land border open to Russians, said yesterday it would stop Russians with tourist visas from crossing in the next few days.
■ A Kremlin-orchestrated referendum is under way in occupied regions of Ukraine, seeking to make them part of Russia, with some officials carrying ballots to apartment blocks accompanied by guntoting police.
Kyiv and the West have condemned the referendum in the Luhansk, Kherson and partly Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions as a rigged election whose result has been pre-ordained by Moscow.
Meanwhile, in a grim reminder of the brutality of the seven-month-old invasion, United Nations experts and Ukrainian officials pointed to new evidence of Russian war crimes. Kharkiv region officials said a mass burial site in the eastern city of Izium held hundreds of bodies, including at least 30 displaying signs of torture.