Unusually long lines to leave the country were reported Wednesday night and Thursday morning at sleepy border crossings, including those with Mongolia and Kazakhstan in the east and Georgia in the south, where hundreds of cars were stuck in a massive traffic jam. the night. jam. In the Chelyabinsk region bordering Kazakhstan, dozens of men were seen standing near their cars on the vast steppe shortly after dawn. At Moscow airports, border guards reportedly conducted spot checks on young men, asking them about their eligibility to be drafted. Putin’s sudden decision to reverse six months of so-called “covert mobilization” and go public with a nationwide, if so far partial, call caught not only ordinary Russians but political pundits by surprise. “I believe a lot of people [in the Russian elite] they were taken by surprise,” said a former senior Kremlin official who worked closely with Putin until 2016. “Politically, this is a move you wouldn’t make unless you were desperate – this is a change of message. Everything is not going to plan.”
Putin kept a low profile in Vladivostok
Indeed, Putin himself in recent speeches in Vladivostok and Samarkand had done his best to be as dull and low-key as possible, talking about the “challenges” of the Russian economy, but without explicitly referring to the war. Although protests against the mobilization have been small, the war’s sudden increase in visibility is likely to send politically dangerous shock waves through Russian society. Although a large majority of Russians still claim to support Putin, a private Kremlin poll leaked in July showed Russians were evenly split between supporting continued conflict or peace. About 15 percent of respondents were strongly in favor of what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation,” with a similar number strongly against, with a 35-35 percent gap between those mildly in favor and slightly opposed. After Putin’s partial mobilization, one thing is clear: the Kremlin’s plan to keep the war low-key and fight it using expendable volunteers, colonial troops from ethnic minority provinces like Buryatia and Chechnya, and prisoners of war has failed. With hundreds of thousands of Russians facing the prospect of being sent to war against their will under threat of prison, Putin’s war – and its failures – have suddenly become very invisible. The author of this submission remains anonymous due to reporting restrictions
