For millions of Russians who have been largely shielded from the reality of Ukraine's bloody seven-month war, Putin's speech on Wednesday announcing a "partial mobilization" came as a shock. Officials provided few details about how the order, the first in Russia since World War II, will be implemented and who will be summoned. However, a day later, the mobilization has begun mainly in remote and poor regions of the country. According to the Russian army, in the last 24 hours some 10,000 people have volunteered to be mobilized.
Regional governments yesterday began issuing orders for reservists, a huge category ranging from people who have served as conscripts, to contract soldiers or part-time officers, to report for summons and barred from leaving the area. Doctors in Moscow also received mobilization notices.
Videos posted on social media show recruits in the Yakutia region of Siberia being herded onto a bus and seen off by a crowd of tearful relatives.
Another video shows confrontations in a recruitment center in Dagestan, one of the poorest and most turbulent regions of the country, where a woman who appears to work for the Ministry of Defense exhorts the men gathered to fight for "the future" and one of They replies: "What future, if we don't even have a present?" Recordings of a large group of young people mobilized in Chechnya are also circulating.
“They took my 40-year-old son in the night,” explained Antonina, a retiree from the Far East who declined to give her last name, to the Bloomberg agency. “All those who were taken in our town were over 40 years old, not a single young person. They grab anyone. There is total panic and confusion,” she added.
Some Russians arrested on Wednesday for protesting against the mobilization received documents for recruitment while in custody, the human rights organization OVD-Info said. According to the NGO, a protester in Moscow was told that he was facing a 10-year prison sentence for refusing to receive an enlistment order.
“Information was received that in 15 police departments detainees were issued with a summons to go to the military registration and enlistment office,” OVD-Info said in a statement.
There was also information that journalists had been ordered to enlist. The Russian television channel Dozhd said that Artem Kriger, a journalist for the SOTA news website, received a preliminary summons after being arrested while covering the protests in Moscow.
For its part, the Russian general staff said nearly 10,000 people have volunteered to mobilize for the offensive in Ukraine in the past 24 hours. "During the first day of partial mobilization, about 10,000 citizens arrived alone at the military police stations, without waiting for their summons," Vladimir Tsimlianski, spokesman for the General Staff, told the Interfax agency.
The mobilization order will affect 300,000 people and will theoretically apply only to those with military experience, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said. Students and people who have not served in the military will not be called up, he said. But the presidential decree does not specify which categories of the two million reservists will be called up and has a secret clause.
Legal restrictions on leaving the country for those subject to the mobilization "have not yet been implemented because it is partial," said Andrei Kartapolov, head of the Defense Committee in the lower house of parliament. "As for how things will be in the future, we'll see."
Faced with the possibility of being sent to the front, many Russians yesterday tried to leave the country. Finland's border service reported a 50% increase in car traffic overnight and Georgian television broadcast long lines of vehicles on the Russian side of the border.
Google data showed an increase in search requests for "how to get out of Russia" and even "how to break an arm." Social networks were flooded with information about the increase in the prices of airline tickets.
