– Will not be cannon fodder – VG
Sabotage, flight, advice, demonstrations, formal errors, corruption and poor military equipment. – I don’t want to be cannon fodder, says Nikita (23).
The young Russian crosses the border from Russia to Georgia, where there have been long queues in recent days.
On Tuesday, Russian authorities say that they must set up a mobilization center at the border crossing itself.
– I have no other choice but to flee Russia, says Nikita news agency AFP when they hit ham.
– I don’t want to be cannon fodder. I am not a murderer, he continues.
Like everyone else AFP has spoken to, he will not give his full name.
A lot has gone wrong for Putin after he ordered mobilization last Wednesday:
Flees
There has been a queue to get out of Russia. Every day there have been rumors that Putin will close the borders to men aged 18-65. It hasn’t happened.
Novaya Gazeta has quoted a source in the presidential administration as saying that 261,000 men left the country from the mobilization order on Wednesday through the weekend. Another independent medium, Meduza, writes that on an ordinary day 9,000–12,000 people leave Russia – and that this number is now two or three times as large.
One of the border crossings that most Russians use is to Uralsk in Kazakhstan. Russians do not need a visa to Kazakhstan – not even a so-called “foreign passport”.
Novaya Gazeta describes the atmosphere in the queue at the border there. People are primarily concerned with buying a SIM card so that they can make calls. They are talking to a guy aged 18–20. Naturally, people don’t want to say their name or where they come from. He is wearing a black Darth Vader T-shirt from Star Wars.
«Mom, it’s okay … mom, no … mom, that’s enough! I’m telling you – everything is bra! … No, they don’t know that at work yet. I didn’t tell anyone …», they quote him.
– It is hell on the border. A real hell, he says and tells the newspaper about endless queues. The sister wanted to buy a plane ticket – but that was impossible. Everything was full.
Vladimir Putin met Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko on Monday. Then it was a theme with the escape from the mobilization:
– Just let them go, Lukashenko snarled accordingly Russian media.
At the border with Georgia, the FSB has sent extra forces to maintain order at the border crossing.
On Tuesday, there was also a message to set up a mobilization point on the border itself. It is the Ministry of the Interior in North Ossetia that says this Cup.
According to the authority in Georgia it reaches 10,000 Russians daily.
Formal errors
In many places, political leaders from Putin’s United Russia party admit that people who should not have been called up for mobilization have been called up. And that these had to be sent home. Some have been students, others fathers of four or in wheelchairs. All these must be excluded from the mobilization.
One by one, governors and other leaders around Russia had to go out and apologize.
Putin’s close ally Valentina Matvijenko, leader of the upper house of the Federation Council, came out harshly against the regional leaders of Telegram:
– I ask you again … to ensure that partial mobilization is carried out in full and absolute accordance with the announced criteria. Without a single mistake!
– It reveals the system’s vulnerability and lack of respect for the individual, says Charlotte Flindt Pedersen, director of the Foreign Policy Association in Copenhagen, to VG.
– We do not know whether Matvienko has been told to turn up the governors in this way – or whether she has done it on her own initiative. But it was regardless a correction to how the mobilization was carried out.
In the end, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also had to admit:
– These are cases where the mobilization decree was broken. In some regions, the governors are working to make amends.
The sabotage actions
It has more than ten acts of sabotage against mobilization centers around the country, according to a count VG has made on independent Russian media such as Jellyfish and Nastoyazhchey Vremya.
Most dramatically, it was at an enlistment office in a town in Siberia where a man opened fire, and the local war commissioner was seriously injured. According to Meduza, it is a 25-year-old from the area who was behind the shooting in Irkutsk.
In most cases, attempts have been made to start a fire. Recipes on how to make ordinary Molotov cocktails – improvised firebombs in bottles, named after the Soviet Union’s foreign minister during the Stalin era, Vyacheslav Molotov – have been spread on social media.
The mothers stand up
There were demonstrations on the same evening that Putin announced the mobilization. Since then, there have not been so many protests, because people know that they can be severely punished. The exception is the mothers.
This is especially true in Dagestan – a Muslim republic in the Caucasus.
They also tried their hand in the neighboring republic of Chechnya, but the controversial president there, Ramzan Kadyrov, stopped it by saying that “then we send their male relatives to the war”.
The independent online newspaper Jellyfish Now ask if the mother actions in Dagestan and a few other places can spread to other parts of Russia.
A Kyiv Post journalist posted this video from Dagestan:
– “Soldatmødrene” emerged as an important organization in connection with the first Chechen war in the 1990s, explains Martin Paulsen, head of the department of foreign languages at the University of Bergen.
– They had a significant impact on Russian opinion at the time and played a significant role in the dissatisfaction of Russian society against the warfare in the Caucasus.
Now they are again standing up to the Kremlin.
That is – the supreme leader of the Republic of Dagestan, Sergej Melikov, has a completely different explanation, according to Kavkaz. Reality:
– The actions are obviously prepared and controlled from abroad.
It definitely doesn’t look like that. It doesn’t seem very well prepared. But they are clear in their speech.
– Our children are not manure, says a woman we see in a video from Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala.
Putin breaks the contract
Vladimir Putin has had great support in the Russian people. Something happened when he ordered the mobilization last Wednesday.
– He broke the social contract he had with his people, says Charlotte Flindt Pedersen, director of the Foreign Policy Society in Copenhagen.
– What do you mean?
– He breaks with those who have passively supported the war – against them not participating in the war themselves. Now it is they themselves and their loved ones who are affected. He destroys his own power base. Well, they see him as a politician – not just as an untouchable president.
Flindt Pedersen believes that Putin has made a similar mistake once before:
– It was when he announced in 2018 that the retirement age was to be raised. It was also a breach of the social contracts with the Russians.
– Support for Putin is greatest among older women. He thus undermines his own voter base. They talk about 300,000 people, but in reality it might handle a million.
Missing weapons and equipment – and morale
– Russian authorities know that morale is breaking among those who are already in Ukraine, and now they are forcing people who do not want to be there to Ukraine. Then it can get even worse, says war researcher Ilmari Käihkö at the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki.
– Second, they have decided that the soldiers who are in Ukraine on short contracts will not be allowed to go home. Morale will suffer because of it. And then of course it is asked how good soldiers these reservists are.
Käihkö does not understand how they will manage to find 300,000 quality soldiers in a short time. And train them up.
– In any case, it will take time!
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Inna Sangadzhieva, herself Russian and subject manager of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, is alarmed by the videos she has posted of the mobilization:
– These people are crammed together in empty, old schools. They must lie on the floor, there are not even people. The system is not ready to mobilize. The equipment is not even in stock.
– In addition, there is nothing to teach them. They are a marching mass. Cannon fodder, believes Sangadzhieva.
War researcher Ilmari Käihkö points to another problem in Russia:
– Corruption. It is possible to buy your way out of the mobilization by paying games.