Mobilisation sends Russians running for the border
Tens of thousands of Russians have fled conscription, and thousands more have protested against it, as Putin’s political support appears to erode
Russia’s mobilisation sent tens of thousands of potential draftees protesting or fleeing for the country’s borders in the 31st week of the war in Ukraine, suggesting that the move had exposed scant support for the war in Russian society and weakened president Vladimir Putin.
Just under 100,000 Russians had crossed into Kazakhstan since the mobilisation announcement on September 21, the Kazakh interior ministry said – three times the average weekly rate of Russian migration to Kazakhstan this year, which has itself been 70% higher than the rate of previous years.[1]
Georgia was receiving some 10,000 Russians a day during the past week, its interior ministry said, twice the daily rate before mobilisation.
The Finnish border guard reported that flows of Russians with EU visas rapidly rose from about 3,000 Russian arrivals a day before September 20 to between 7,000 and 8,000. At least four Russians were caught crossing the border illegally.
Independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta estimated the number of those who’d fled at over a quarter of a million.
“It’s clearly an upset. [Putin] was hoping he could conclude this ‘special military operation’ without having to rely on conscripts, and in a short time period. Now he has been forced to bring the war to Russian households. This is the first moment we see the backlash on the part of public opinion,” said George Pagoulatos, director of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, a think tank in Athens.
First-year cadets at the Kuznetsov Naval Academy in St. Petersburg protested when they were told they would be mobilised after just a month’s training, said Ukraine’s military intelligence. The cadets have reportedly been moved from barracks and kept under surveillance to prevent them from contacting their parents.
In cities across Russia anti-war protests erupted. Conscription officials were publicly challenged to bring the troops home in the Kabardino-Balkarian republic in the Caucasus. In another Caucasian republic, Dagestan, anti-war protesters blocked a highway. Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, who has send three battalions into Ukraine, has refused to mobilise further troops in Chechnya. In the far eastern republic of Yakutsk, women took to the streets to ask for the return of their husbands and sons.
The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights said Russian police had arrested at least 2,400 anti-war protesters. Social media reports suggested that many if not all would be sent to fight in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s general staff said about a thousand subpoenas had been issued to men of fighting age in Sevastopol, Crimea, who were threatened with criminal prosecution if they failed to enlist.
“[Protests] are not negligible given the very hard regime the Putin regime subjects protesters to – we have seen people being beaten badly or disappearing. So these people are really taking a risk, which is another indication of the intensity of discomfort and anger that is accumulating in Russian society,” Pagoulatos told Al Jazeera.
Putin has attempted to allay the anger of Russian voters by recruiting intensively in poorer, non-Slavic republics.
Ukraine’s Centre for Combating Misinformation, a branch of the country’s National Security Council, said Russia was expending disproportionate mobilisation efforts in the non-Slavic republic of Buryatia, in Russia’s far east, neighbouring Mongolia. There, the Centre said, men aged 18-72 were being sent summonses, or drafted off the street. In the village of Kurumkan, 700 men were mobilised out of a total population of 5,500.
Ukraine said non-Russian minorities were over-represented among war casualties. Conscripts from Dagestan, Buryatia, Krasnodar, Volgograd and Bashkortostan, plus other non-Slavic regions, reportedly made up almost 40% of fatalities, though they account for 10% of the Russian Federation’s population.
Some Russians are asking for asylum, which could eventually create a refugee congestion on Europe’s eastern borders akin to that seen on its southern borders in the last seven years.
“Normally there are 200-500 applications for asylum by Russians per year in Finland,” said Minna Ålander, research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Relations. “This year the number has been so far within the average (400). Since the announcement of the mobilisation, 87 Russian citizens applied for asylum,” she said, representing an elevenfold rate increase.
The exodus has prompted a European debate on humanitarianism versus security, she told Al Jazeera.
“Germany seems to consider a simplified asylum procedure for Russian conscripts, while Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland view a large number of Russian draft dodgers as a potential security threat for two reasons: because not necessarily all of them actually oppose Putin (or even the war as such) and because Russia has a track record of using its citizens in other countries as a pretext for aggression against those countries,” Ålander said.
So far, humanitarianism seems to be winning out on Russia’s borders. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said of Russian emigrants, “Most of them were forced to leave by the desperate situation. We must take care of them and ensure their safety. This is a political and humanitarian matter.”
But Russia has a potential 20 million reservists to call upon, prompting the counter-argument that the draft pool in Russia is simply too large for the sheltering of draft-dodgers to make a difference on the battlefield, says Ålander.
British defence minister Ben Wallace called the mobilisation an admission of defeat. “President Putin’s breaking of his own promises not to mobilise parts of his population and the illegal annexation of parts of Ukraine, are an admission that his invasion is failing… Ukraine is winning this war… and Russia is becoming a global pariah.”
Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai said newly drafted Russians had already arrived on the front lines, with little or no training – something Ukraine’s general staff confirmed. Ukraine’s Security Council secretary Oleksiy Danilov called it a “comprehensive programme for the disposal of Russians.”
Global opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine appeared to grow after Putin’s mobilisation. World leaders gathering at the 77th UN General Assembly in New York overruled a Russian objection to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy being the only world leader allowed to address the body remotely.
Nonaligned countries joined the Western alliance in criticism of the war. Indian foreign secretary S. Jayashankar said, “the trajectory of the Ukraine conflict is a matter of profound concern for the international community,” and insisted that “egregious attacks committed in broad daylight” should not go unpunished.
Brazilian foreign minister Carlos Alberto Franca said the war, “endangers the lives of innocent civilians and jeopardises the food and energy security of millions of families in other regions.”
China’s foreign minister Wang Yi reaffirmed its support of Ukraine’s territorial integrity in a meeting with Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, an indirect criticism of Putin’s war.
US national security advisor Jacob Sullivan said Putin’s mobilisation was a sign of weakness. “"What Putin has done is not exactly a sign of strength or confidence, frankly, it's a sign that they're struggling badly on the Russian side," Sullivan said in an interview with CBS’s "Face the Nation."
“Sham’ Referenda
On September 27, Russia said the four Ukrainian regions it largely occupies – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson – had declared overwhelmingly for annexation by Russia in separate referenda. The approval rates were in the 80th and 90th percentile, and turnout was well over 70% said Russia.
EU and US officials have called these “sham” referenda. They have said they will not recognise the results because the regions are under occupation and in a state of war.
Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai said Russian pollsters were issuing passports in return for “yes” votes to a referendum on annexing the region to Russia.
In the devastated port of Mariupol, Ukraine’s military intelligrance reported that occupation officials went door-to-door, forcing households that received humanitarian aid to vote.
Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Misinformation also reported other irregularities. In kherson, a single family member would typically be asked to fill in several ballots for absent family members. In Energodar, the city housing workers at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, ballots were brought door-to-door by armed men and filled in at gunpoint.
Ukraine’s nuclear plant administrator, Energoatom, said plant workers were overwhelmingly against the annexation of Zaporizhia, so Russian troops (of whom there are 4,500 at the plant) dressed up as workers and mingled with the real staff during a shift change, speaking in favour of the Russian occupation to Russian media who were present. They then, reportedly, cast ballots in favour of annexation.
Operations
Throughout the week, Ukrainian counteroffensives clawed back ground. In Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces moved well east of the Oskil river, creating enclaves of liberated settlements north and south of Lyman in the Donetsk region, and suggesting its recapture is only a matter of time.
Ukrainian counteroffensive in blue, Russian occupation in red.
Source: ISW
Ukraine also said it had liberated 59 settlements in the southern region of Kherson since the start of its counteroffensive on August 29.
Ukraine’s armed forces were continuing to corrode Russian fighting capacity by striking ammunition and equipment concentrations. In the period 17-23 September, they destroyed two ammunition warehouses, they said, without specifying where. On September 25, Ukraine’s forces in Kherson destroyed two ammunition warehouses and struck crossing points across the Dnipro river at Nova Kakhova, Ukraine said.
[1] Kazakhstan has had a net immigration rate of a million Russians a year for the past three years, the interior ministry told Tengrinews. This year that rose to 1.7mn Russian immigrants.