Msees wagons, dozens of men in uniform, some with balaclavas over their faces. In videos from the western Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, the recruits who have just been drafted complain about “absolutely brutal conditions”. There is a lack of everything, money, organization, equipment and food, unless you buy it yourself. Some men are holding assault rifles, but they are “not registered to us,” says one.
“We’re completely useless, there’s zero preparation,” another. A third films himself on the train, coughs constantly, says that the majority of people here have contracted Corona. A fourth introduces himself in his clip by name and reports that after being drafted into a regiment of motorized riflemen, he was sent to a tank battalion; he and other “mobilized” people spent six days in ditches and pits they dug themselves. The state should help.
Videos like these are also being shared via Telegram channels owned by Russian military bloggers. President Vladimir Putin, who announced the mobilization on September 21 with promises for the recruits, seems lenient to their belligerence. In Russia, culprits need to be found for the chaotic mobilization conditions that are bringing many people directly into contact with the war known as “special operations” for the first time.
Like a call for order
The military bloggers, state media representatives and some politicians locate the culprits in the Ministry of Defense and demand corrections and penalties. Putin appears in the role of the “good tsar” who announces who should not be caught up in the mobilization. He read out such a decree on certain groups of students and postgraduates on Wednesday. In this scheme, what is known about what is happening in the Belgorod region, for example, appears not like an uprising, not even like criticism of the war, but like a call for order – for more, not less, Putin.
“They got what they had to expect,” says Alexandra Garmashapova about the complaining recruits. “In Russia, with its quick-fix procedures, it would be strange if everything went as promised during mobilization.” Garmashapova has her own view of mobilization, of the war in general. The Russian journalist, who has lived in Prague for several years, sees it on the outside as Putin’s attempt to re-enslave Ukraine, on the inside as “the continuation of the genocide of the indigenous peoples of Russia”.
Garmashapova himself belongs to one of these peoples: the Buryats, a Mongolian ethnic group that came under tsarist rule in the Russian Empire and fell victim to shootings and forced resettlements during the period of Stalin’s terror. There are around 461,000 Buryats in Russia today, says Garmashapova, most of them in the southern Siberian republic of Buryatia and in two neighboring regions, but nowhere so many that they make up the majority.
Draft orders sent even to dead people
Buryatia itself has a chief who does not speak Buryatic; the language, which is only “optional” in schools in the region, is disappearing, according to UNESCO, just as the languages of other ethnic minorities in Russia are under threat. Partly Christianized, Russified, Sovietized, spatially dispersed and without a chance to come to terms with all these traumas: With this story of powerlessness and persecution, Garmashapova explains that many Buryats remain silent, even if their mobilization is going completely without a hitch.
Garmashapova reports that in the days after Putin’s mobilization, conscription orders were distributed indiscriminately. Some were addressed to old, young, fathers of disabled children, even to the dead – because those in power had followed the lists that they also used for the manipulated elections. It was about fulfilling a plan.
