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Russian President Vladimir Putin unexpectedly steps up his invasion of Russia Ukraine There was mounting resistance across Russia on Friday, with villagers, activists and even some elected officials asking why the draft campaign seemed to hit ethnic minorities and rural areas harder than big cities.
Some of the greatest suffering occurred in the Caucasus Mountains, hundreds or thousands of miles from the front, and in sparsely populated northeastern Yakutia across the Arctic Circle. Community leaders describe remote villages where most working-age men have been drafted in recent days, forcing families without men to make ends meet on the land before the long winter.
“We have reindeer herders, hunters, fishermen — we have too few of us anyway,” Vyacheslav Shadrin, chairman of the council of elders of a small indigenous group known as the Yukaghirs, said in a phone interview. “But they are the most important candidates.”
Putin announced the call-up on Wednesday, describing it as a “partial mobilization” necessary to confront Ukraine and its Western backers, who he said were seeking Russia’s annihilation. It was a move he had long delayed, even as supporters of the war clamored for conscription in order to allow Russia to step up its offensive.
Russia will mobilize about 300,000 civilians, with a focus on men with military experience and special skills, Russian defense officials said, although some Russian media outlets now operating abroad have reported the number could be much higher.
But by Friday, even some of the hawkish commentators who had been urging the draft to be drafted had criticized it for what appeared to be a broad and uneven rollout. Rybar, a popular pro-war blog on Telegram, described receiving “a flood of stories” of people with health issues or no combat experience receiving draft calls, even though some volunteers were turned away.
Far from helping Russia’s war effort, such chaotic conscription could end up hurting it, hawks warn. Some say that officers who carry out orders are more concerned with formally carrying out orders than winning the war.
“If we mobilize, then it should be the basis for strengthening the army,” Andrei Medvedev, a Moscow lawmaker and state TV host, wrote on Telegram. “Not the cause of the unrest.”
In Yakutia, an association representing the Sakha, the region’s main ethnic group, warned that conscription could have dire consequences there. The group distributed a letter to Putin saying the mobilization could lead to “exploitation of the male part of the already sparsely populated northern region of Yakutia”.
Even Sardana Avksentieva, a member of the Russian parliament representing the region, wrote on social media on Thursday that she had heard of a village of 300 in which 47 men were killed. Conscripted into the army.
“What’s the logic of these numbers?” she asked, claiming that people in rural areas were drafted at a higher rate than in cities. “What ratio are we talking about?”
There were signs of turmoil as soon as Putin announced the draft, although he described it as “one-sided”. It appears that all areas of society have been affected to some degree – breaking the normal feeling that the Kremlin was trying to maintain inside Russia during the first seven months of the war. A new wave of Russians is crowding flights, cars and buses abroad. According to Kommersant, Russian businesses including airlines, technology companies and agricultural companies are concerned about how the call-up will affect them.
Among those issues, the Defense Ministry said Russian men with certain white-collar jobs in banking, information technology and telecommunications would not be required to fight. In parliament, lawmakers pledged to put conscripts on hold on loan repayments and ask employers to keep their jobs.
For all its improvisation, the Kremlin appears to be aware of the political risks of ordering civilians to serve. Analysts say Putin has delayed announcing the draft for fear of a domestic backlash despite widespread shortages and heavy losses in his army.
Remote, ethnic and rural areas appear to be the hardest hit, at least initially. That’s because remote areas and marginalized groups are considered less likely to protest, said Kirill Shamiyev, who studies Russian-military-civilian relations at the Central European University in Vienna.
“The Kremlin is doing what it has always been doing,” he said. “Its first filter is to preserve Vladimir Putin’s power in Russia. That’s why in these regions, in rural areas and small towns, there are far more people being asked to provide services.”
Still, he said, the Kremlin’s “obey or you’ll be repressed” approach could backfire when conscripts return from the front lines and tell their communities the truth about the war.
“The personal risk to Vladimir Putin has risen significantly,” he said, as the military and defense sector “become a central element of the Kremlin’s legitimacy.”
Interviews with people in three regions of Russia’s predominantly Muslim Caucasus Mountains show widespread fears of mobilization. In Chechnya, a small business owner described seeing several men on the streets of the capital Grozny, and said a third of the mosques that are usually overcrowded on Friday are empty.
In Kabardino-Balkar, a local activist reported that 38 people had been drafted into the army in a village of 2,500 people, and there were rumors that young people were injured in order to avoid conscription. But few protested, he said, because civic life had effectively been liquidated.
In Ingushetia, a Russian officer said he was trying to avoid traveling to Ukraine.
“People are close to panic,” he said. “The police are stopping the car and handing over the draft notice.”
All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Roslan Totrov, a journalist from the Caucasus region of North Ossetia and now based in Dubai, said the draft had become a “reality check” for those who came from afar to support the war.
“As soon as this suddenly starts affecting your relatives, loved ones and acquaintances, there is a natural, artificial, defensive response,” he said. “The first question that many, many people start to ask is: Why?”
In remote settlements in Yakutia, where high-speed internet is often lacking, Russian state television remains the most important news source for many. Yukagill community leader Shadrin described members of his indigenous group as overwhelmingly supportive of the Kremlin, scattered in small villages across a wide area. But after getting panicked calls from mothers this week, he suggested that might change.
In rural Yakutia, support for Putin is “extraordinary,” Shadrin said. “Now I think it’s starting to wake up.”
At a reindeer herding business, four out of 20 herders have been drafted into the army, he said. Among the Yukagils, he said, he already knew of seven men who had been called, and he expected that number to increase as hunters and herders returned to their villages and accepted summonses. Yukagill has a total population of about 1,600 people, of which only 400 are males between the ages of 18 and 45, he said.
Several community groups have published open letters calling for a moratorium on the recruitment of ethnic minorities in the region, claiming that even during World War II, the Soviet Union’s Arctic indigenous peoples were not mobilized because they were too few.
“Our village is small and everyone’s gold is worth his weight,” Ivan Shamayev, chairman of the Sakha assembly and signatory of a letter, said in a telephone interview. “Villages will find it difficult to survive without men and that’s why they need to figure this out.”
Perhaps most shocking to residents of the area, some said in interviews, the draft came at a time when families were scrambling to prepare for winter. Like much of Siberia, Yakutia is undergoing dramatic changes due to climate change, with rapidly rising temperatures thawing permafrost and triggering devastating floods.
Alert messages about the mobilization circulated on WhatsApp. A local activist retweeted several requests for help she received. One was a woman from Verkhoyansk district, a region of Siberia where temperatures can drop to minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit. She wrote that her son had not fixed the floor of her home and had to remove it after the summer floods.
“He has two young children, his wife is pregnant, and I just had surgery,” the woman wrote. “I don’t know how we’re going to get through this winter.”
The activist, who asked to withhold her name for security reasons, said Yakutians have been watching the war on television and are aware of Putin’s argument that it is a war to protect their country. But until now, it’s all been very abstract.
“On TV, they say it’s to defend the motherland,” she said. “But now it is not the motherland that is threatened, but our own lives.”
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