https://aumag.net/russia-(...)to-fight-in-ukraine/Russia grabs men off the streets to fight in UkrainePolice and military officers stormed a Moscow business center unannounced this week. They were looking for men to fight in Ukraine - and they grabbed almost everyone they saw. Some musicians practicing. A courier there to deliver a package. A man from a service agency in Moscow, very drunk, in his mid-50s, with difficulty walking.
"I have no idea why they took him," said Alexei, who like dozens of others in the office complex was rounded up and taken to the nearest military recruitment office, part of a harsh new phase in the Russian tour.
In towns and cities across Russia, men of fighting age hide to avoid the officials who seize them and send them to fight in Ukraine.
Police and military press gangs have in recent days grabbed men from the streets and outside metro stations. They have been lurking in apartment building lobbies to hand out military drafts. They have searched office blocks and hostels. They have invaded cafes and restaurants and blocked the exits.
In a pre-dawn sweep of the MIPSTROY1 construction company's dormitories on Thursday, they took more than 200 men. On Sunday, they gathered dozens at a shelter in Moscow for the homeless.
Officials raided MIPSTROY1 construction company dormitories on October 13 and took more than 200 men. (Video: @mozhemobyasnit | Telegram)
The press gangs seem to drop down at random. It's terrifying - and at times comically random. Alexei, a pacifist of 30 years, lives with his cat, and until Russia pulled him away, he enjoyed hanging out with friends in bars, cafes and parks, going to concerts and planning his next holiday in Europe. (He and others in this report spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld for his safety. The Washington Post has confirmed the raid but could not independently verify the details he provided.)
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An official entered Alexei's office on Tuesday. Two police officers and several plainclothes military officials arrived and demanded his identification. They ordered him to go quietly with them "or we will use force," he said.
"I was panicking," he said. "I had never been detained before. Everyone knows that if you are detained by the police in Russia, it is very bad.
Suffering massive military losses and repeated defeats in Ukraine, Russia has begun to cannibalize its male population. The hard-eyed pundits on state television demand more Ukrainian blood and more sacrifices from Russian men, who they say have become too used to a soft life.
But the new phase of Putin's mobilization risks undermining Russians' tacit support for the war and even his manufactured popularity - and could create social unrest. Especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg, major cities that have been largely untouched by the war until now.
More than 300,000 Russian men and their families have fled Russia since the mobilization, reports from neighboring countries show. The authorities have set up mobilization points at border crossings to prevent departures. Many others want to go after seeing the aggressive police raids and the first reports of the newly drafted men dying in the war.
Activist Grigory Sverdlin, who left Russia and is based in Georgia, launched an organization this month, Go By The Forest, to advise men in Russia to avoid the draft. He said the group has consulted with 2,700 men in 11 days and told 60 men how to surrender in Ukraine. At least eight have succeeded, he said.
"Obviously, people are very stressed because they're worried that they're going to be pressured into shooting other people," Sverdlin said. "So people are afraid not only of themselves, but of participating in this unjust war."
At a restaurant in Moscow, police present conscription orders to a diner who says he is celebrating his daughter's birthday. (Video: The Washington Post)
Yevgeny, 24, quit his job as a mechanic and is hiding in a relative's cabin far from Moscow. He has deleted his social media profiles and cut off contact with friends. He spends his days working in the garden and he goes to bed early and watches a lot of YouTube.
"I don't want to kill people and I don't want to be killed, so I really have to lay low now," he said. "But even here I don't feel safe. We live in a time when your neighbors could report you. They might call the police and say there's a young guy living in this house when he should be fighting fascists in Ukraine."
Yevgeny never supported the war. Now he has stopped driving for fear of being pulled over by the police. He can't leave Russia because he has no passport, and even going to the store in the small village feels risky.
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"I'm panicking and my mother is very nervous," he said. "I'm stressed and I'm depressed. I try not to think about how long this could go on, because you can go crazy."
Two of his friends are worse off. They were called up at the end of last month, he said, and with a little training they are on their way to the front.
"I have a couple of friends who supported the war and believed that there are Nazis there who are killing poor Ukrainians and that Ukrainians should be freed and so on. But they change their minds after mobilization. They have started asking questions and surfing the Internet for information," said Yevgeny.
"They don't want to die, especially when you don't understand why you have to die," he said. "What's the point?"
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that 222,000 of the 300,000 targets had been summoned and that the process would be completed within two weeks. Pro-war hard-liners insist a second round will be necessary.
The raids in Moscow and St. Petersburg has been deeply controversial, partly because the cities have suffered relatively few losses in Ukraine. The burden of struggle has largely been borne by small ethnic groups and poorly educated men from poor rural areas.
In a sign that the government fears a growing urban backlash over the raids, Andrei Klishas, a senior member of Putin's United Russia party, said on Friday that the conscription effort was illegal.
"It is inadmissible to arbitrarily seize everyone on the street," he said.
Anti-war sentiment may harden as the bodies of soldiers deployed just weeks earlier begin to return home for burial. Alexei Martynov, the 29-year-old head of a government department in Moscow, was mobilized on September 23 and was killed on October 10. He was buried last week. Five soldiers from the southern Ural region, mobilized on September 26 and 29, were killed in Ukraine in early October, Chelyabinsk authorities reported.
A woman angrily berated a team that delivered military drafts in the lobby of her apartment building in St. Petersburg. (Video: SOTA)
A comrade of the Chelyabinsk men who survived a stunning Ukrainian assault called a friend and described what happened, according to the transcript of a phone call published by BBC News Russian. He said he had received no education. When he fled, he said, there were bodies everywhere.
"We got there the first day, never having fired a shot, and they sent us, like meat, straight to an assault unit with two grenade launchers. At least I had read the instructions on how to use them." By day 3, the soldier and his comrades were in the front line trenches.
Almost daily, videos appear on Russian social media of conscript soldiers, angry because they have not been given decent uniforms, weapons, training or quarters. Testimonies of men who should have been exempted from being sent to combat are common. Aleksei Sachkov, a 45-year-old Moscow doctor, signed a contract to treat wounded soldiers in Voronezh, Russia, near the border with Ukraine. He stopped calling his wife, Natalia, on September 24. She heard from Russia's military hotline a week later that he was fighting in Ukraine as part of a tank unit, she said in a video posted online.
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As unrest grows, men of military age are being turned back at the borders as they try to leave the country. In March, weeks after Putin launched the invasion, he promised there would be no mobilization. But last month he cut off the tacit assurance that the conflict would be fought only by professional soldiers in return for the Russian public's passive acceptance of the war. Widespread anger at Putin's September 21 announcement suggests that public support for the war is lower than the Kremlin claims.
"It's the pain of the regime because a very common view in Russia now is that this war is lost," Sverdlin said. "And it seems that just issuing subpoenas, detaining many thousands of people and sending them to war is just buying this regime a little more time. But it's just buying time, because of course these people who were caught on street now, don't make good soldiers because they don't know how to fight."
As the backlash intensifies, some Russians are confronting authorities and recording videos. A woman berated a team in the lobby of her apartment complex in St. Petersburg. A Russian truck driver posted a video of himself confronting a police officer and a military official who tried to take him to the enlistment office.
"I don't give a s--- about your mobilization. You are the one entitled, not me. After all, you have a gun, not me. Why don't you go and
mobilize yourself?"
The police officer tried to write a charge and demanded the driver's documents.
"I'm not giving you my documents. Why should I?" the truck driver said, "If you fail to bring order to your country, why do it in another country? And where? By just destroying it completely?"
A Russian truck driver posted a video of himself confronting a police officer and a military official who tried to take him to the enlistment office. (Video: Svoboda Slova)
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In the raucous din of the military recruiting office where Alexei ended up, he said, many of the men were agitated, some were furious and others shrank into themselves. They stood in line at one office after another, where they were forced to sign the military draft, submit their documents and undergo a medical examination. Many were office workers seized on the street. A "strange" couple told Alexei that they were volunteers looking for an exciting lifestyle change.
He was shocked at how many men meekly donned the army uniforms handed to them and let themselves be led, apparently straight to training bases. One of his work colleagues was among them.
"I saw men who were lost and confused, and at the same time very weak," he said. "They didn't want to fight for themselves. They got papers and signed them all obediently. They weren't focused. They just stared off into space like they'd given up."
For Alexei, the threats and bluffing continued for hours as officials pressured him to sign the draft. He refused. The police were called. The did nothing, but a police guard at the door would not let him go.
He watched the lines of nervous men. The drunken city worker lay in a deep sleep. A member of the elite Russian Guard special police threw a noisy tantrum at the attempt to enlist him.
Alexei called a lawyer. He entered the military commissar's office, filmed him on his mobile phone and demanded to know the legal basis for detaining him.
"He became very angry and shouted at me to leave his office." At 8 pm he was finally allowed to go. Now he wants to leave Russia, but fears that he may be conscripted at the border.
"I'll wait until this is over, somewhere safe."