But that changed in mid-September after Aleksey boarded a flight to his hometown of Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Republic of Buryatia, which is located around Lake Baikal in the Siberian region of Russia. (Alexei is not his real name; the CBC agreed to change his name to protect him from potential retaliation.) Aleksey was going on a short trip to visit friends and family he hadn’t seen since he moved to Moscow a few years ago. The roughly 6,000 kilometers between the two regions means that planes sometimes have a stopover in countries south of the Russian border. This was one of those flights, which meant Aleksey had to take his passport with him – something he would later be extremely grateful for. And that’s because on September 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin was announced a partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists — young men who had previously passed through the country’s conscription — in order to continue the war in Ukraine. While Putin said the mobilization was nationwide, those most affected are Russia’s ethnic minorities — among them, the people of Buryatia (referred to as Buryat). Alexei had spent a few days in Buryatia before Putin’s televised address, hoping the president’s decision would not lead to mass conscription of his people. “We still had hope that all this would be settled, the draft notices would not come,” Aleksey said. But it wasn’t worth the risk to wait. That night, he and his friends quickly packed their bags and coordinated their escape. Aleksey’s international flight to Buryatia meant he had his passport with him, making a last-minute departure from Russia possible. The next day, he and his friends left. But not all Buryats are so lucky.

Buryatia has a high casualty rate

The recent Russian mobilization comes as Ukraine reclaims a growing percentage of its previously lost territory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy advertises the military recent counterattack victory at Liman on Saturday, as videos began circulating of Ukrainian soldiers taking down Russian flags and raising their own. Melissa Chakars, a professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and an expert on Buryatia and Russia’s Mongolian peoples, called the mobilization “a big turning point in the war.” “[Putin] claimed that [drafting] it was going to spread to all regions, so people expected that a certain percentage of people from each region [were] they will be taken,” Chakars said. He said that while people from the more central cities, especially Moscow and St Petersburg, had been able to function without much fear of the plan, Putin’s mobilization announcement had “changed things”. Some of the estimated 300,000 Russians who have fled the country are seen trying to cross the border into Georgia on September 26. (Submitted/Name not given) The protests, which had largely subsided since the early days of the invasion in February, erupted across the country and prompted an exodus of nearly 300,000 Russians to neighboring borders within five days of Putin’s televised speech, according to reports Novaya Gazeta. Novaya Gazeta, of which he is the editor-in-chief Peace Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratovwas forced to cease operations in early September due to the war and now operates in exile from Riga, Latvia. While Russian men in metropolitan areas were now being recruited, the mobilization greatly reinforced existing trends as to which populations provided the most fighters. At the beginning of the war, report reports many men from Buryatia were sent to fight in the war. The area also suffered a significant number of casualties. By 23 September, 275 identified men from Buryatia had been killed in the war, according to an independent count by Mediazona and the Russian service of BBC News. The only Russian region with a higher casualty rate is the Republic of Dagestan, with 305 identified men killed in action. However, the total population of Dagestan is over three million. Buryatia is less than a million. While the Buryat are indigenous to the region, with their own language, many of them never learn that language and instead speak only Russian.

Mobilization raids

The reason for the high pension rates in the ethnic regions, especially in Buryatia, is twofold. First, Buryatia’s communities are largely concentrated around Lake Baikal, and recruiting men from more remote parts of the country means that any potential opposition to the war would likely come far from Moscow or St. Petersburg, Chakars explained. The other part of the story is that these areas are usually pretty low income. “Buryatia is one of the poorest regions in the entire Russian Federation. Traditionally, the army is a steady job,” Chakars said. View of Bolshoy Kunaley, a village in Buryatia. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters) Alexandra Garmazapova, president of the anti-war Free Buryatia Foundation (FBF), said the distribution of draft communiques in Buryatia late last month looked more like a raid. “People from different age groups got it, people with disabilities, even people who are no longer alive,” he said. In at least one report, a man who died two years ago from COVID-19 received a draft notification. “They grab whoever they can and send them to war,” Garmazhapova said. “This is not a partial mobilization, but a full mobilization.” According to reportsbetween 3,000 and 5,000 men were mobilized from Buryatia on the first day of the announcement. A man had an officer and a teacher show up at his front door in the middle of the night between September 21 and 22. He was handed the draft notice and forced to sign it, Garmazhapova said. “The only reason he answered the door was because he thought it was his brother coming home from work,” she said. “If he knew it wasn’t his brother, he certainly wouldn’t have opened the door.”

Avoiding the draft

According to the current legislation, citizens are obliged to open the door to the police. Citizens are also legally required to report to conscription offices after they have been served and sign their draft notices. But some began to refuse to open their doors.
Garmadzhapova tells the story of another man who wouldn’t answer his door to officers who wanted to serve him his notice. Eventually they left and the man thought he had avoided being sent to war. WATCHES | Russian men head to the border to avoid the draft:

Chaos at Russia’s border as men try to escape mobilization

Those crossing the Russian-Georgian border describe why they chose to leave after Vladimir Putin ordered hundreds of thousands of reservists to be mobilized for the war in Ukraine. But while he was filling up his car at the gas station the next day, he saw a bus coming from his village full of newly recruited men. The bus stopped at the gas station and the man was forcibly boarded. “Without his things, without his documents they took him,” Garmazhapova said. “The car was left at the gas station and his relatives had to come and take the car back home. There are many stories like this.” In a rare video on social media, Yanina Nimaeva from Ulan-Ude addresses Buryatia’s leader, Alexei Tsydenov, because her 38-year-old husband and father of five, who had never served in the military, was drafted. The news of these events prompted many young men to pack their bags and head for the nearest borders to Buryatia — Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Part of the FBF’s job was to assist in evacuation efforts by coordinating transportation and bringing Buryat men to the border. Once they passed, representatives of the foundation helped the young men find room and board, food and work. “It was very sad to look at them … You understand that these are very young boys who had no plans to leave,” Garmazhapova said, recounting how she helped men like Aleksey settle in Astana, Kazakhstan. He said their average age was between 20 and 22 years old. “It’s almost like you can imagine their parents throwing their kids on the last train that’s leaving, just to save them.”

Road to Redemption

Many of the soldiers sent to the front lines of the 2014 war in Ukraine were also from Buryatia, notably many tank operators. As a result, Garmazhapova said many had gained a reputation as “Putin’s Buryat warriors”. A 2015 pro-Kremlin video featured some Buryats talking about their support for Putin and their willingness to fight for him. “Before, when people asked what Buryatia is, or who the Buryats are, it would take a long time to explain the place. We would have to explain that Buryatia is near Lake Baikal, near Mongolia,” Garmazhapova said. “But now, if you say you’re a Buryat, people immediately say, ‘These are the people who are fighting for Putin in Ukraine.’ It’s very negative and it’s a terrible reputation.” People carry portraits of relatives who fought in World War II during the Immortal Regiment march in Ulan-Ude on May 9. (AP) He said the latest war threw Buryat soldiers “into the meat grinder” once again. The FBF was founded in March 2022 with the publication of an anti-war video of Buryats from around the world refuting the idea that Buryat soldiers willingly fought for Putin. “Unexpectedly, this video collected a million views and Buryat [people] started writing to us: “Oh my God, finally someone [else] he said I’m against the war. I thought I was the only one,” Garmazhapova said. The FBF was flooded with messages, first with support and then with pleas for help to get the soldiers out of the war. Mothers began writing to the organization asking how to cancel the military contracts of sons who were either on the front lines or about to go there. Garmazhapova said they were able to successfully help some soldiers cancel…