After months of anticipation, the confirmation that Russia will mobilize for the Ukrainian War, albeit partial, generated renewed and sparse protests in two dozen major cities in the country.
With the acts came the inevitable repression that marks the Kremlin’s intolerance of dissent in recent years, which gained the force of law with the Russian invasion of the neighboring country in February. Since then, a new law curbing criticism of the military and even prohibiting the use of the word war, under penalty of up to 15 years in prison, has silenced what remained of opposition in practice.
According to OVD-Info, an NGO monitoring police abuse, as of 8:20 pm (2:20 pm GMT) there were 630 detainees in 32 cities across the country. Russia has 146 million inhabitants.
This is primarily explained by repression, which has only increased since the last tourists left the country for the 2018 World Cup. .
Here and there, you can see protests by members of the economic and political elite, but the fear of arrest speaks louder. There were larger protests at the beginning of the war, which gradually subsided: in all, since February, OVD-Info has counted 16,437 people detained across the country.
This Wednesday, there were small acts in places like Irkutsk and Khabarovsk, in Siberia, and also in Moscow and St. Petersburg. “A lot of people are afraid of turning into gear oil,” Serguei S., a 49-year-old financial analyst who lives in the center of the capital, said via text message.
He served as a conscript in the Army, in theory staying out of that first call from Vladimir Putin. “I don’t know what will happen,” he said, who has a wife and two daughters. The 300,000 reservists targeted by the Kremlin must have previous military experience, according to the Defense Ministry, but the presidential decree is entirely vague about rules.
“It’s not clear what can happen,” lawyer Serguei Krivenko, from the legal rights NGO Cidadão, told The Moscow Times. Not that the financial analyst planned to take to the streets: he says he disapproves of the war on principle, but not to the point of criticizing the government’s actions.
He is not alone. The Levada Center, Russia’s last independent polling institute, punished as a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin, found earlier this month that 46% of Russians strongly approve of the Armed Forces’ actions, while 30% strongly support it. Only 17% disapprove of them.
Putin’s popularity, as measured by the unsuspecting Levada, is also above 80%, a similar jump to the one recorded when the president annexed Crimea in 2014. Until now, the president had avoided mobilization precisely with an eye on maintaining these levels.
It is possible to speculate that the military will try to keep the urban middle class more or less out of the draft. The fact that the new territories that Moscow wants to annex over the weekend in Ukraine will automatically deliver up to 35,000 troops to the Kremlin’s direct control could also help to defuse the effect.
In any case, the Moscow Times reported an exponential increase in demand for international tickets to the few destinations still served from Moscow: there was, the newspaper said, an eightfold increase in ticket prices to Dubai, Istanbul, Yerevan and Baku. , for example.
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