The turn taken by Vladimir Putin to try to reverse the negative tide for his forces in the Ukrainian War has not only generated criticism abroad, due to the announcement of the annexation of four occupied regions in the neighbor and the threat of use of nuclear weapons against the West.
There is a great confusion going on in Russia itself, due to the lack of clarity of the rules of partial mobilization determined by Putin to finally provide a number of soldiers adequate to his intentions in the war.
In some cities, there are queues at military service stations, and reports abound of people trying to leave the country. The Kremlin denied the exodus, but remnants of independent media operating on the Russian internet reported congestion at the Finnish border and a rush for international air tickets.
There is an evident exaggeration, usual in Western media critical of Putin’s war, but there are also question marks in the air. “Nobody really knows if a police officer will arrive with a letter at home. It’s quite distressing,” said Serguei S., 47, a Moscow financial analyst, who asked not to be identified.
The measure’s decree, published shortly after the president’s speech on national television at 9 am (3 am in BrasÃlia) on Wednesday (21), is vague, allowing for a series of later regulations. So far, what is known was told by Defense Minister Sergei Choigu on Russian state TV.
Namely: the objective would be to call up up to 300,000 reservists with some military experience, not just basic training. It’s a magic number, as no one knows how many people there are in that category. An obvious place to look would be the group that served in the Russian intervention in Syria’s civil war, which began in 2015.
According to the only available data, from 2015 to 2018 about 63,000 soldiers passed through there. But it is a number disputed by experts, and far from the announced goal — apart from the fact that some of these people may still be active.
This cut-off excludes Sergei from the first call, as he was just conscripted. But his brother Ivan, 35, passed through Russia’s biggest overseas base in Gyumri, Armenia, when he served in the 2010s. “He is terrified and in fact seriously considering going to Turkey,” he said. In principle, the mobilization is valid only on Russian territory.
Ivan also lives in Moscow, a city that has already put a price on every mobilized person who returns home in a coffin. According to the municipal decree, compensation will be equivalent to BRL 260,000 for death and BRL 86,000 for serious injury and BRL 43,000 for minor injury. Each Muscovite summoned will earn a monthly bonus of BRL 4,300, in addition to the salary per contract yet to be defined.
Until now, each Russian region paid a different amount for volunteers to fight in Ukraine. In Perm, in the Urals, a contract paid R$26,000 a month, an enormity. With the mobilization and the introduction of a new law giving up to 15 years in jail for those who escape it, this will certainly be revised downwards.
Still, regional discrepancies will occur, like Muscovite bonuses, but not only that. This Thursday (22), videos circulated with police organizing recruitment queues in Ulan-Ude, capital of distant Buryatia (Siberia). According to human rights activists, they weren’t exactly volunteers.
In Moscow, the independent website Mediazona said, some youths who were arrested protesting the mobilization on Wednesday night received registration papers already at the police stations. Asked about this, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov did not deny: “As far as I know, this is within the law.”
The demonstrations were, as usual, repressed: around 1,400 people were detained in 38 Russian cities, said abuse monitoring NGO OVD-Info. This is a much lower number than recorded on other occasions, reflecting both the repression and the approval so far of the war, which is rejected by only 17% according to the independent institute Levada.
There is another point to worry people like the brothers Sergei and Ivan. According to the newspaper Novaia Gazeta, which was the last independent print to circulate in Russia and today operates virtually in exile, the Kremlin’s ultimate goal is to mobilize not 300,000, but 1 million people.
This would be in paragraph 7 of the presidential decree, which was omitted in the publication as confidential. The Russian government denied the information, but also did not explain what the item is about. Thus, the door is open for new categories of men to be summoned.
Putin’s central problem in his invasion, according to experts, was the lack of human resources. There were primary tactical errors and logistical issues, but in the end what mattered most to Kiev not having fallen in the first week of the war or to Ukraine having reconquered the Kharkiv region this month was insufficient troops.
The partial mobilization aims to remedy that, after months of denials from the Kremlin due to the measure’s obvious unpopularity. But the pressure from within was high, with military bloggers who reflect some of the uniformed establishment openly calling for Putin to take a tougher line.
Russia has 900,000 active troops and 2 million reservists who left the forces no more than five years ago. Putin wants to increase the number by 10% from 2022. By law, the citizen remains on the reserve until the age of 50, which expands the possible number of drafted to 25 million of the 146 million Russians, according to the Defense Ministry.
But this is not yet officially on the table, not least because war has not been declared against Ukraine. In Russia, what happens in the neighbor is still called, under penalty of punishment for those who say something different, a “special military operation”.
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