Tears for Russians called up to fight
Escalation of war reverberates across country
A day after President Vladimir Putin announced a call-up that could sweep 300,000 civilians into military service, thousands of Russians across the country received draft papers and some were being marched to buses and planes for training — and perhaps soon a trip to the front lines in Ukraine.
Putin’s escalation of the war effort was reverberating across the country, according to interviews, Russian news reports and social media posts.
As the day wore on, it became increasingly clear that Putin’s decision had torn open the cocoon shielding much of Russian society from their leader’s invasion of a neighbour.
Mothers, wives and children were saying tearful goodbyes in remote regions as officials — in some cases, ordinary schoolteachers — delivered draft notices to houses and apartment blocks. In mountainous eastern Siberia, the Russian news media reported, school buses were being commandeered to move troops to training grounds.
Russian officials said the call-up would be limited to people with combat experience. But the net appeared wider, and some men decided it was best to head for the borders.
Yanina Nimayeva, a journalist from the Buryatia region of Siberia, said that her husband, a father of five and an employee in the emergency department in the regional capital, had been inexplicably called up. She said he received a summons to an urgent 4am meeting where it was announced that a train had been organised to bring men to the city of Chita.
“My husband is 38 years old, he is not in the reserve, he did not serve,” Nimayeva said in a video addressed to regional officials.
Despite the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent, protests have erupted across Russia in response to Putin’s move, with at least 1312 people arrested, according to the human rights watchdog OVD-Info. More protests were reported yesterday, including in Dagestan, an impoverished southern Russian region where anti-draft protesters blocked a federal highway.
“When we fought in 1941 to 1945 — that was a war,” one man yelled in a video of an angry crowd widely shared on social media. “And now it’s not war, it’s politics.”
Military-age men clogged airports and border crossings trying to flee, and some ended up in distant cities like Istanbul and Namangan, Uzbekistan. “We decided that we don’t want to live in this country anymore,” one reservist said after arriving in Turkey.
Historians said it was the first time since World War II that the Kremlin had declared a wartime mobilisation.
Putin’s spokesperson, however, maintained that officials would continue referring to the invasion he ordered as only a “special military operation”, and not a war.
In Moscow, where there were reports of young professionals with no military experience being called up, a Russian lawyer, Grigory V Vaypan, compared the shock of Thursday to February 24, the day Putin’s invasion began.
“Then the war started there,” he said. “Now it also started here.”
Despite Russia’s challenges on the front line, where Ukrainian troops have often outnumbered Russian soldiers, Putin long resisted declaring a draft because he feared a domestic backlash, analysts say. His authoritarian rule and redoubled crackdown on dissent this year notwithstanding, the Kremlin keeps close tabs on public opinion and has sought to avoid protests.
After Putin’s Wednesday speech, a backlash did indeed burst into the open, though there was no immediate sign of a nationwide anti-draft movement emerging. In the city of Baksan in the North Caucasus region of Kabardino-Balkaria, more than 100 people gathered near the city administration to protest the conscription of their loved ones, said a local activist who asked for his name to be withheld for his security.
“Kabardino-Balkaria, like the rest of Russia, woke up yesterday in horror,” Ibragim Yaganov, an activist from the region who is now in Poland, told The New York Times. “The war, which was somewhere far away on TV, suddenly came to people’s homes.”
At the United Nations yesterday, insults, accusations and talk of war crimes flew as the Security Council met. The meeting was called to discuss evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses by Russian forces, but Russian diplomats tried to flip the narrative, casting Russia as the aggrieved party.
The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, claimed that Ukraine had launched “an assault” on ethnic Russians in the Donbas region, and said the goal of countries supplying weapons to Ukraine was to prolong the conflict and “to wear down and weaken Russia”.
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said: “Tell President Putin to stop the horror he started.”
It was the first time before the war that he and Lavrov were in the same room together.
In Moscow, where OVD-Info reported 538 arrests at anti-war rallies on Wednesday, authorities came up with a novel way to discourage protests: handing draft summonses to protesters.
They did so in at least six Moscow police stations where anti-war protesters were taken, said OVD-Info.
One protester, Mikhail, 29, said he had been detained for 8-1/2 hours at a Moscow police station. The Times is withholding his last name for his security. At the station, Mikhail said, an officer wrote him a draft notice, threatening him with jail time if he refused it.
He refused it anyway, and went into hiding after being released.
“You’re standing there asking yourself whether you should go and fight and die there, or spend 20 years in prison,” Mikhail said in an interview.
“This is a rather complicated question when you face it directly, a question that you shouldn’t be asked like this — especially when you didn’t do anything wrong.”
In a bid to neutralise discontent, Putin said that those called up would be paid on par with contract soldiers.
Russian news reports said this meant that draftees could make more than US$3000 ($5143) per month, five times the average Russian salary.
While some Russian men were fleeing the prospect of conscription, others seemed resigned to their fate.
One correspondent for Novaya Gazeta — the independent newspaper whose licence the Russian government revoked this month — wrote that he did not “want to kill anyone” but that, if drafted, he would do his duty.
“How will I look my parents in the eyes if they send off their younger son and I, the older one, manage to sit it out?” the correspondent, Ivan Zhilin, wrote. “What is my future now? To kill, or to be killed?”