RUSSIAN MEN FLEE PUTIN’S MILITARY CALL

 

                   …Russian men head for the trains and airports to leave Russia

 

Half a million men had already left Russia after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

 

Packed airports.  Sold out trains. Lines of cars and scooters stretching for miles.  President Vladmir Putin’s announcement last week of a mobilization of reservists sent thousands of Russian men  racing for the borders.  Nearly half a million had already left the country soon after Russia Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, and now neighboring nations like Finland and Georgia are seeing a new influx.  A day after Putin’s announcement, the Georgian border was chaos as Russian guards were “blocking men from leaving.”  Some of those said they planned to refuse service, saying they would be “better off in prison instead of the Ukraine.”  But that might not be an option.  Many of the few thousand demonstrators who dared to protest the call up last week weren’t sent to jail, but instead were shipped straight to the military.  “The only safe way to hide is to emigrate.”

So much for “partial mobilization, said Antonia Asanova in: ”Russia in Exile.”  The Kremlin at first claimed it would call up 300,000 men, but sources have said that a secret clause in the decree authorizes drafting of 1 million men.  And while Putin said only men with prior military service qualified, some of those who got the first draft notices have never served at all, while others last saw service decades ago.  In Siberia, where a  third of the population are indigenous Buryats, recruiters rousted men out of their beds at midnight, giving them just an hour to pack and no chance to flee.  That was no accident.

Ethnic minorities are being disproportionately targeted in Crimea, for example, some 90% of those called up were Crimean Tatars.  And rural regions are required to send “many times more” recruits proportionally than those in major cities.  Ramzan Kadyrov said the mobilization would not apply to his province because too many Chechens had already died in Ukraine.  That’s because Kadyrov, long a key Putin ally, recruited 8,000 Chechens as paid mercenaries and sent them to fight for Russia.  Most did not come back, and Kadyrov knows that if he tried to call up any more, defiant Chechens would simply “shoot the military commissar and retreat to the mountains.”  The Chechen strongman’s open revolt against mobilization is a sign that Putin’s rule is growing shaky.

For now, the refuseniks are a small minority of those called up.  But what if the trickle “turns into a stream of refugees?”  European leaders are bickering about whether to let them in, after all, there’s no general right to asylum for those evading conscription. Europe has already accepted more than 5 million Ukrainians since the war began.  If the increasingly unstable Putin grows “more radical,” we could see our second refugee crisis inside a year.

Copyright G. Ater 2022