As Putin Begins Troop Call-Up, Many Men Flee the Country

By Editor Foreign Affairs/NY Times

Moscow: A day after President Vladimir V. Putin announced a call-up that could sweep 300,000 civilians into military service, thousands of Russians across the country received draft papers and were being bundled into buses on Thursday for training — and soon, possibly, to the front lines in Ukraine.

On Thursday, Mr. Putin’s escalation of the war effort was already reverberating across the country, according to witnesses, video and social media posts by residents and relatives of conscripts who have been summoned to fight. In mountainous eastern Siberia, the Russian news media reported that school buses were being commandeered to move troops to training grounds, and schools were becoming draft centers, with teachers writing “povestki,” or draft papers for people who were being called up.

Videos circulated on social media purporting to show new conscripts saying tearful goodbyes before boarding buses.

The call-ups reportedly began within hours of a recorded video announcement by Mr. Putin in which he raised the stakes in the war and escalated his confrontation with the West despite Russia’s humiliating setbacks on the battlefield. By declaring for the first time that Russian civilians could be pressed into service in Ukraine, Mr. Putin risked a public backlash but said the move was “necessary and urgent” because the West had “crossed all lines” by providing sophisticated weapons to Ukraine.

Despite the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent, protests erupted on Wednesday night across Russia in response to Mr. Putin’s move, with at least 1,312 people arrested, according to the human rights watchdog OVD-Info. Many Russians sought to travel to other countries to escape being called up to fight as men across the country reported to draft offices.

Russian officials said the call-up would be limited to people with combat experience. But Yanina Nimayeva, a journalist from the Buryatia region of Siberia, wrote on Thursday that her husband — a father of five and an employee in the emergency department in the regional capital — had been called up despite never having served in the military. She said he had received a summons to an urgent meeting at 4 a.m. in which it was announced that a train had been organized to bring reservists to the city of Chita.

“My husband is 38 years old, he is not in the reserve, he did not serve,” Ms. Nimayeva said in a video addressed to the regional leader, Aleksei S. Tsydenov of Mr. Putin’s United Russia party. In a sign of how the call-up is deepening discontent with Mr. Putin’s government, Ms. Nimayeva continued: “I understand that we have plans. Our republic needs to gather 4,000 soldiers. But some parameters and principles of this partial mobilization must be respected.”

Others also voiced anger at the government.

“Buryatia experienced today one of the most terrible nights in its history,” Alexandra Garmazhapova, the head of the antiwar Free Buryatia Foundation, wrote on Facebook. She said she had received “hundreds of messages asking how to leave for Ulaanbaatar,” the Mongolian capital.

It is not known how many people have received summonses. A woman from Dagestan, one of Russia’s poorest regions, who had already lost one of her sons in the war with Ukraine, told a New York Times reporter that three buses carrying newly mobilized soldiers had left her town. She sent videos showing armored personnel carriers driving along the potholed roads, although their authenticity could not be immediately verified.

In Ulan-Ude, the regional capital of Buryatia, draft papers “were distributed to houses and apartments all night,” according to a report from Arig-Us, a local independent television station. The local news media reported that new recruits had gathered at a military facility a short walk from a sports complex where funerals are held for soldiers who die in Ukraine.

Farther northeast, in the city of Neryungri, one video showed four buses lined up at a stadium. Similar videos showing new recruits gathering appeared on social media from across the country — including Vladivostok in the far east, Pskov and Belgorod on the Ukrainian border, the working-class Moscow suburb of Lyubertsy, and Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus.

First published in New York Times