Desperate Russian men break their own arms to avoid military call-up
GUN-TOTING Russian troops are going door to door in occupied areas of Ukraine to force people to vote in Vladimir Putin’s controversial referendums on whether they want to become part of Russia.
As desperate Russian men try to avoid being drafted into the war in Ukraine – including breaking their own arms – security camera footage has shown heavily armed soldiers accompanying officials who are organising the referendum that Western leaders say is a ‘sham’.
Russian state media yesterday claimed the military was involved for ‘security’ reasons but critics say the tactics are being used to ensure a higher turnout as part of a cynical Kremlin propaganda campaign.
A woman in the southern town of Enerhodar told the BBC: ‘People are being asked to answer verbally and then a soldier marks the response on the sheet of paper.’
Many Western analysts are convinced the referendums – taking place until Tuesday across the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – will be rigged to allow Putin to illegally claim occupied regions of Ukraine as Russian.
A Ukrainian government official in Kyiv told The Mail on Sunday: ‘The vote is being conducted under the barrel of Russian soldiers’ guns, with no independent observers monitoring the process. Everyone knows the referenda are absurd and the results are pre-ordained.’
Meanwhile, following Putin’s announcement last week of a ‘partial mobilisation’ to recruit up to a million men to the armed forces, potentially eligible young men are
‘Leave me – you are no use to me and our kids in a coffin’
making frantic attempts to leave the country or taking drastic action to avoid the call-up.
Until now, the war had not deeply touched the lives of most middle-class Russians. Tens of thousands of soldiers have died, but few came from the ranks of the better-off. That has now changed.
The cost of airline tickets to the dwindling number of destinations still prepared to admit Russians is rocketing, as thousands of young people look to flee the country rather than face the prospect of receiving call-up papers.
Some unable to afford a plane ticket or drive across the border have devised more imaginative or distressing ways to escape the draft. Since family men are exempt, there has been a rush of single men going to registry offices seeking to marry women who have several children. Others are registering as carers for elderly relatives they have previously neglected.
And, chillingly, online searches for the phrase ‘How to break an arm at home’ rose in number, as men facing conscription contemplated drastic action to exploit disability clauses in the recruitment rules by injuring themselves.
The cheapest flights to Dubai now cost more than £8,000 – about ten times the average monthly wage – and Aviasales, a popular air ticket site, has opened an online option to choose the destination ‘Wherever I can go’.
Others are escaping by road. Queues of cars up to ten miles long built up at frontier points from Finland to Mongolia as part of an unprecedented exodus.
Daniil, 32, a car parts salesman from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, went with the blessing of his shop manager wife, who told him: ‘If you love me, leave me, right now – get out. Walk across the border if you have to. You are no use to me and our kids in a coffin.’
The last she heard, her husband was in a car with three other ‘escapees’ in a queue inching towards the border with Georgia. Those most vulnerable to being drafted are employees of state-run enterprises and students.
After some employees of Russian commercial airlines reportedly received call-up notices, pilots and traffic controllers’ unions demanded guarantees that they would be excluded.
Meanwhile, police have been dispersing demonstrations against the call-up in several cities, holding more than 100 protesters.
Sberbank, a banking and financial services giant, has started handing draft papers to its workers. And at a university in Ulan-Ude, the capital of the republic of Buryatia, bordering Mongolia, armed police have been filmed marching students from lecture theatres to enlistment offices, even though Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu had promised that students would not be called up.
Such tactics are not unusual in impoverished non-Slavic regions thousands of miles from the centre of power.
Places such as Buryatia have provided much of the cannon fodder for Putin’s war, with many hundreds of their young men having already gone to their deaths on the killing fields of Ukraine.
And it is in the more remote regions that the rules covering conscription are flouted most brazenly by the authorities.
Yanina, 33, who lives in Buryatia, says: ‘They want to take my husband to the battle-front despite having five under-age children.
‘He has never served in the army, and is not in the reserve.
‘Yet various officials have been trying to hand him call-up papers.’
Not everyone is opposed to the war, however.
The remorseless efforts of the Kremlin propaganda machine have created something akin to mass hypnosis in some.
As a result, another sort of queue can be seen on the streets of Russian cities: long lines of people enthusiastically mustering to board buses to be taken to army barracks for military training.
‘It’s my patriotic duty,’ says one man in his 30s.
‘I believe in Putin. The West hates us, and is threatening us with nuclear war. I trust Putin. We are like the Soviet heroes in the Great Patriotic War [World War II] going to do our duty and slay the Nazis.’ However, a university academic whose students fear the call-up argues that appearances can be deceptive. ‘Some feel a burning patriotic duty, fuelled by Putin’s rhetoric and all the gushing propaganda on TV,’ she says.
‘But others are fighting for money. Mainly from poor, far-flung regions, as a soldier they would earn more in a month than they currently get in a year.
‘If they are wounded, these guys are promised extra money, and in the event of death, their families will get perhaps £50,000 – a huge sum for them.
‘So off they go to war – perhaps smiling. But who knows if the Russian state, beset by economic
‘I will not kill – or be killed – for this despot’
chaos, will actually honour these sums if the war drags on and on.’
Perhaps the most fortunate Russians are those who have made it out of the country. Georgi, 21, an IT graduate from Siberia, is one of these lucky ones.
He and a dozen male friends – all born after Putin came to power – have driven by a circuitous route through the Altai mountains in the south of the country into Kazakhstan under cover of darkness.
They are safe for now but their exile may be far from easy.
Apart from being a long way from home, they can expect retaliation from a vengeful Kremlin, which has threatened to block the bank accounts of refuseniks who have fled abroad. ‘I don’t know what will happen,’ says Georgi.
‘But I cannot stay in my country under these evil policies. I will not kill – or be killed – for this despot.’