President Vladimir Putin’s call on Wednesday to mobilize Russian troops to fight on Ukraine’s battlefields is upping the ante at home, where the government’s message has been that life goes on as normal despite “the special military operation ” next to.
The partial mobilization shatters this narrative, as 300,000 young men are called up to serve in Ukraine.
This is the first mobilization of this type in Russia since the Second World War.
“I was shocked by this,” said Georgiy, a Moscow-based student who received a draft notice on Sept. 19.
CBC spoke to him Wednesday morning and agreed to release only his first name because he could be punished for speaking out.
The 23-year-old served in the military four years ago when he was drafted but recently received a draft notification asking him to report to his local military office as he was called up for a role technical.
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He said when he reported to the office, his documents were altered to show he was to serve as a frontline soldier.
When he and his family watched Putin’s speech on Wednesday morning, his mother was crying.
“I want us and other countries to live in peace,” he said.
“We don’t need a war.”
Request a waiver
Georgiy told CBC he was going back to the recruiting office with his father to see if he could be exempted from military service because he is studying.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday that Russia was not recruiting students or conscripts to fight in Ukraine, but in recent months there have been have been reported of conscripts sent to the front, including some who served on the warship Moskva which sank in the Black Sea on April 14.
Shoigu said if there are 2.5 million men in reserve who are eligible to be called up, 300,000 will be called up now. The first wave of mobilization concerns those who have done their military service and are under 35 years old.
Shoigu also said 5,937 Russian soldiers had been killed in Ukraine, a number significantly lower than the United States estimated in July, when authorities put the Russian military death toll at around 15,000.
“The military shortage in the army is now huge,” said Sergei Krivenko, director of Citizen Army, a Moscow-based organization that advises young men and their families on their conscription rights.
Trying to recruit foreigners
In an interview with CBC, he said he believed Russia was underestimating the number of its soldiers who were killed and that the partial mobilization is not only a sign of the number of dead and wounded, but also an indication that the country’s recruitment drive hasn’t worked.
On Tuesday, Russia’s State Duma, its lower house of parliament, passed a bill to make it easier for foreigners to obtain Russian citizenship if they sign a one-year contract with the military.
The city of Moscow has also announced the establishment of a recruitment center for foreign citizens.
Krivenko said this was aimed at migrant workers from former Soviet republics like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan who work in Russia, but he doubts they will register en masse.
He said previous efforts to recruit from this group have not been successful because people are choosing to keep working and are “probably not ready to die for these crazy ideas from the Russian president”.
Vesna, a group of Russian activists, called on Wednesday night for demonstrations across Russia against mobilization and war.
Despite the threat of arrest, Maria Lakhina, an organizer who fled Russia for Armenia in March, hopes people will take to the streets because they risk being drafted, just like their brothers and friends.
She says that when war comes to “people’s homes”, they are more affected by it.
The Russian army was pushed back near Kharkiv
The Russian army was pushed back last week from a large swath of land near Kharkivwhich, according to Ukrainian officials, covers 8,000 square kilometers of its territory.
Russian officials tried to portray the battlefield loss as a chance to “regroup”, but some pro-war bloggers online called on Russia to step up its attack.
Four Ukrainian regions currently controlled by Russia will organize referendums by joining Russia between September 23 and 27.
Donetsk and Luhansk have been ruled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014 and are in the east of the country, while Kherson and Zaporizhia are in the south.
Votes condemned by Western leaders
Russia celebrated its capture of both areas by creating a land corridor to Crimea, which it annexed in 2014. Organizers of a referendum in March 2014 said a majority of people in Crimea had asked to leave Ukraine and to join Russia, but most of the international community dismissed the vote as illegitimate.
Western leaders have already condemned the latest planned polls as an attack on Ukraine’s territorial integrity. But through his speech, Putin warned the West not to intervene or there would be consequences.
He said that if Russia’s territorial integrity is threatened, it will use all means “to protect Russia and our people”.
“We will certainly use all weapon systems at our disposal,” he said. “It’s not a bluff.”
Mārtiņš Vargulis, a researcher at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs and a lecturer at Riga Stradins University, said “this is a clear indication that Russia is going all out.”
He sees Putin’s decision to call for a partial mobilization as a kind of “stress test” for his popularity.
While a poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center put Putin’s approval rating at more than 80 percent in August, it’s hard to gauge its accuracy, given that people can be sent to jail for publicly criticizing the president and what he still insists on calling his “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Vargulis said Putin’s nuclear threat is worrying given he likely feels desperate to succeed on the battlefield, but he’s not sure the president is ready to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine or NATO countries.
He believes Putin is using the threat as a way to try to stop Western countries, especially the US and UK, from supplying arms to Ukraine.
“I think he would not like to test whether the West will intervene after such use of tactical nuclear weapons,” he said.
In an interview with German television BILD, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he didn’t think Putin would use nuclear weapons either, nor would Western countries allow it.
Regarding the ongoing referendums, Ukrainian officials rejected the votes, saying they would not change any of their plans and that the military would continue to fight to retake Ukrainian territory.
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