Putin's mobilization draws public blowback, especially in minority regions

KYIV — The young man that walked in the recruitment center in Ust-Ilimsk, Siberia, early on Monday morning had told his mother he was going to enlist. But he had other plans. When he arrived, he calmly entered the building and walked up to the podium, where military commissar Alexander Eliseev, the head of the local draft committee, was working. The young man took out a concealed firearm, and opened fire.

According to Igor Kobzev, the governor of Irkutsk Oblast, Eliseev remains in a critical condition in hospital. When arrested, 25-year-old Ruslan Zinin told Russian media he was motivated by the drafting of his best friend into the army.

Russia is continuing to experience a wave of protests and civil unrest as its public come to terms with the implication of Russian President Vladimir Putin's "partial mobilization" that he announced last week. Initially said to be a call-up of 300,000 reservists, the Latvia-based independent Russian news outlet Meduza has reported that the real figure could be as high as 1.2 million. The same outlet also reported that since Putin's order came down the Federal Security Service (FSB), which controls Russia's border service, recorded 261,000 men exiting the country.

The most significant street protests so far have come in the Dagestan region, where protesters filled the streets. Video posted to social media shows people blocking roads, fighting with Russian police, and chanting anti-war and anti-mobilization slogans. There are also growing signs of protesters becoming more organized and forcibly resisting Russian police who attempt to arrest fellow demonstrators.

The protests in Dagestan have partly been driven by the belief that the war and these latest mobilization orders are disproportionately targeting Russia's poorer areas and ethnic minority-dominated republics. The Republic of Dagestan, a state in southern Russia that borders Armenia and Georgia, is one of several heavily Muslim-majority enclaves with a complicated history of insurgency, separatism and terrorism. Moscow fought two brutal wars against the breakaway republic of Chechnya in the 90s and early 2000s; now the warlord-president of that republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, is a staunch Putin ally who has deployed his own "Kadyrovite" militants into Ukraine.

Research published in August by BBC and the Russian media outlet Mediazona found that, of 3,798 casualties they could identify via local media reports and the statements of families and local authorities, Dagestan and Buryatia — a state that borders Mongolia and contains a sizable indigenous Mongolic population — had suffered the largest number of confirmed fatalities: 270 and 245, respectively. By contrast, Moscow, home to 9% of Russia's total population, lost only 14 people.

“In Buryatia, the campaign is called Bartholomew’s Night, after the 16th century Catholic massacre of Protestants in France,” said Paul Goble, a former State Department and CIA official who specializes in Russia’s ethnic and religious minorities. “That’s not something you hear very often in the Russian Far East, is it? Dagestan is at the point where people are now talking of a ‘Maidan’ in the regional capital Makhachkala,” (Maidan refers to Ukraine’s revolutionary protest movement in 2014.)

The Kremlin’s bloody entanglement with the North Caucasus even has a historical antecedent in Ukraine’s post-Soviet development. When Ukrainians of all backgrounds voted overwhelmingly for independence from the Soviet Union in a 1991 referendum, Russian President Boris Yeltsin prevailed in vain upon his Ukrainian counterpart, Leonid Kravchuk, to bring Kyiv into a new union with Moscow. One of Yeltsin’s motives, as repeatedly relayed to then-U.S. President George H. W. Bush, was “that without Ukraine, Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim republics,” according to Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy.

Nevertheless, Goble thinks a better indicator of where mobilization is hitting hardest is economic rather than ethnoreligious. “Moscow is targeting places that are poorer because those people are more likely to see military service in a positive way, with the exception of those who've already seen people come home dead. And a lot of Buriyats have done just that already.”

Moscow and St. Petersburg have had demonstrations on a smaller scale. Russian riot police have been deployed there to disperse crowds and can be seen beating and aggressively dragging off protesters — or simply anyone standing in their midst. Videos published on social media captured incredibly confused scenes in which Russian police detain pro-Putin counterdemonstrators, even a woman bystander simply waiting at a bus stop. According to independent monitors in Russia, over 1,300 men and women had been detained following protests in these Russian cities earlier in the week, with many Russian men of conscriptable age apparently being given their draft papers after their arrests.

“Sergey” (not his real name) fled St. Petersburg within 24 hours of the mobilization order last week. He told Yahoo News that his best friend is a first-order candidate for call-up because he served in the military for a year seven years ago. “He’s a businessman and supports his entire family, including his parents and sister,” Sergey said. “And he’s really frustrated because he did everything right, paid his debt to the Motherland and meanwhile people are claiming medical excuses — many of them fake — to get out of being sent to Ukraine.”

Russians are also turning to more extreme forms of objection as peaceful protests have been predictably ignored or repressed. In Ryazan, a city southeast of Moscow, a Russian man set himself on fire at a bus station whilst shouting slogans against the war, and his impending participation in it.

Recruitment offices have been set on fire or attacked. Video released by Russian media outlet Mash shows a station wagon ramming the entrance of an office in the Volgograd district, before the driver lights and tosses several Molotov cocktails through the doors and windows of the building. Pictures published the next morning show the office was heavily damaged.

Arson is also said to count as more than a symbolic gesture: Some observers have pointed out that the Russian army still largely relies on paper records, which would likely be destroyed in any fire. The Volgograd attack was far from an isolated event, according to Meduza, which claims 11 military enlistment offices and 6 administrative buildings have been set ablaze in Russia since the start of mobilization.

The furor occurs against a backdrop of increasing discontent against the hastily implemented mobilization policy, whose critics include hawks and regime loyalists. Margarita Simonyan, head of Russian state media outlet RT, complained that mobilization officers were “infuriating people, as if on purpose, as if out of spite, … as if they’d been sent by Kyiv,” while also grumbling that mobilization papers were being handed out to those too old or sick for military service. Vladimir Solovyov, host of Russian state television’s flagship talk show and another prominent Kremlin mouthpiece, called for those responsible for the botched roll-out of the policy to be shot.

Anger at mobilization has been stoked by recently conscripted Russian men who have published footage of the dire conditions and decrepit equipment they’ve been issued with on social media. One widely shared video shows new recruits inspecting issued AKM assault rifles, which are covered in rust both externally and internally, appearing to be barely functional. Training barracks are shown to be in a substandard state, with conscripts being made to sleep on filthy mattresses with no bedding.

Other Russians have been complaining that their conscripted relatives have been sent immediately to the front, with little or none of the promised training. In the city of Lipetsk, the wife of a recently mobilized man told Russian media that her husband and 1,000 other men had been given just one day’s training before being sent to join the 237th Tank Regiment, currently fighting in Ukraine.

“There comes a point, as Gorbachev found out,” said Goble, “when using repression is like throwing water at a grease fire — the fire spreads.”