Rebellion of the Russian women
Protests across the country as their loved ones are called up to fight in Ukraine
WOMEN led some of the fiercest protests yesterday against Vladimir Putin’s move to conscript their husbands and sons for his war in Ukraine.
Police fired warning shots into the air in an attempt to control chaotic demonstrations in the Dagestan region, where hundreds took to the streets in anger at the mobilisation decree.
The largely female crowd was seen admonishing officers, who moved to break up a march and lashed out at demonstrators in Makhachkala, the capital of the largely Muslim province.
The presence of brave female protesters at demonstrations recalled the opposition to the Chechen wars, when the Union of the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia was one of the most influential groups that campaigned for peace.
But the poverty-stricken region on Russia’s south-western border with Georgia was only the latest site of protest since Putin announced the country’s first mobilisation since the Second World War.
In Yakutsk, a city in eastern Siberia, wives, mothers and daughters also protested at their loved ones being sent to Ukraine.
They chanted anti-war slogans and brandished signs reading ‘no to genocide’ in a rare show of defiance against the Kremlin.
The city was one of the first areas where men started to be drafted into the Russian army and sent for training at military bases.
Local media said dozens of arrests were made.
It is widely suspected that ethnic minorities in the more remote regions of the country, such as Siberia and the Caucasus, are being disproportionately targeted by the Kremlin’s efforts to mobilise for the war.
But even Russia’s key cities have been sites of discontent.
At least 50 people were detained by police dressed in anti-riot gear in Moscow yesterday.
And in Putin’s home town of St Petersburg, police rounded up a small group of protesters, loading them on to a bus as they chanted ‘No mobilisation’. Protester Vasily Fedorov, a student wearing a pacifist symbol on his chest, said: ‘Everyone is scared. I am for peace, and I don’t want to have to shoot.’
A country-wide law can punish any Russian citizen with up to 15 years in jail for spreading so-called ‘fake news’ against the military or the Ukraine invasion.
Human rights group OVD-Info estimates at least 2,000 people have been arrested across the country since Putin’s conscription decree last week.
Flights out of Russia have been close to being fully booked this week, with ticket prices soaring due to the demand from an apparent exodus of people unwilling to join the conflict. Authorities in Mongolia and Georgia reported long tailbacks of cars looking to cross the border.
In a sign of Putin’s desperation, the Institute for the Study of War think-tank said Russia was planning to force Ukrainian prisoners of war to fight for Moscow, a war crime under the Geneva Convention. It also emerged last night that Putin is set to formally annex parts of occupied Ukraine later this week, just days after Moscow’s bogus votes on joining Russia.
State-run media said yesterday he could announce Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zapor
izhzhia have joined the Russian Federation as early as Friday. MPs in the country’s rubberstamp parliament, the Duma, will debate a draft annexation law on Thursday after a rigged voting process that the West has dismissed as a sham.
Russian invaders are going from house to house in the four regions, some 15 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, to bully locals into voting in favour of becoming part of Russia.
It is a repeat of the tactics used in 2014 by Putin to justify seizing the illegally occupied peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine.
Russia has vowed any further Ukrainian attacks on these areas would be seen as an assault on its own sovereign territory.
Putin has suggested that he could use nuclear weapons in response, supposedly to defend his newly-seized territory’s ‘integrity’.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan last night emphasised that the West was taking the Russian leader’s threats seriously.
‘We have communicated directly, privately at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear
‘I don’t want to have to shoot’
weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the United States and our allies will respond decisively, and we have been clear and specific about what that will entail,’ he told america’s CBS TV channel.