“I felt like the doors were closing and if I didn’t leave now, I might not be able to leave later,” Ivan said, adding that he thought of a close friend back home with two young children who, unlike him, was unable to pack up. his things and leave.
Alexey, a 29-year-old who arrived in Georgia from Russia by bus on Thursday, told CNN the decision was partly due to his roots.
“(Half) of my family is Ukrainian … I’m not in reserve now, for this wave of mobilization, but I think if this continues, all men will be qualified,” he said.
Putin said on Wednesday that 300,000 reservists would be called in as Moscow tries to replenish depleted forces after a successful counteroffensive by Kyiv this month. The move is set to change the scope of Russia’s invasion from one carried out mainly by volunteers to one involving a larger section of its population.
The announcement sparked a scramble for some Russians, with social media chatter on platforms such as Telegram exploding with people frantically trying to figure out how to get seats in vehicles headed for the border, with some even discussing the bike.
Long traffic queues formed at land border crossings in several countries, according to videos. Images on Kazakh media websites appeared to show vehicles set up near the Russia-Kazakhstan border. In one, published by Kazakh media outlet Tengri News, a person can be heard saying their vehicle has been “stuck for 10 hours” in Russia’s Saratov region as they try to reach Kazakhstan.
“Endless cars. Everyone’s running. Everyone’s running from Russia,” the person can be heard saying in the video. CNN cannot independently verify the videos.
In the arrivals hall of Istanbul airport on Friday, 18-year-old student Daniel told CNN of his plans to wait it out in Turkey. He flew to Turkey on Friday for a pre-arranged holiday, but since the mobilization was announced, he has had to face a new life in the country.
“We are young, we can learn and build a new life. We want to be useful. For now it’s a vacation and wait,” he said of his plans with his girlfriend. “Since I’m a student, technically I’m not mobilizing, but that might change. And we know the government is lying to us. We’re just meat for them,” Daniel said.
Software engineer Roman told CNN that he hastily bought his ticket to Turkey minutes after Putin’s rallying speech. He plans to go to Portugal, where he has been granted a visa.
“War is terrible. I am strongly against this war. Everyone I know is against it. My friends, my family, nobody wants this war. Only politics wants this war,” he said, adding that the woman he had to stay in Russia as he does not have a Portuguese visa.
“The only plan is to survive. I’m just scared,” he added.
Another Russian citizen, who declined to be named, described the war as useless and cruel, “it should never have started in the first place. And I feel sorry for the Ukrainians — I sympathize with them.” The divorcee will fly to Israel on Saturday without his two children, who are still in Russia.
“Hopefully I’ll get them when I get settled,” he said. “I will try to remove them because Russia is definitely not the right place for them.”
On Thursday, Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee issued a statement saying the border was “under special control” but was operating normally amid “an increase in the number of foreign citizens” entering the country. The number of passenger vehicles entering Kazakhstan from Russia increased by 20 percent since September 21, the country’s State Revenue Committee said in a separate statement.
On Finland’s eastern border with Russia, traffic intensified on Thursday night, according to the Finnish border guard. Earlier in the day, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin told parliament that her government is ready to take action to put an “end” to Russian tourism and transit through Finland, according to Finnish public broadcaster Yle.
Many of those who left appeared to be men. Women are not part of Russia’s conscription.
Travel agency websites also showed a dramatic increase in demand for flights to places where Russians do not need visas. Flight sales websites indicated that direct flights to those countries were sold out at least until Friday, while anecdotal reports said people were struggling to find ways to leave well beyond that time frame.
At least two Russians who left the country, one by land and one by air, told CNN that the departing men are being questioned by Russian authorities, with questions such as whether they had military training and other questions about Russia and Ukraine.
“It was like normal passport control, but every man in line stopped and asked additional questions. They took a bunch of us in a room and asked questions mostly about (our) army (training),” Vadim, a Russian who arrived in Georgia by air, he told CNN.
The mobilization begins
Inside Russia’s borders the mobilization that some were aiming to escape appeared to have already begun. Videos on social media showed the first phase of partial mobilization in several Russian regions, especially in the Caucasus and the Far East, away from Russia’s wealthy metropolitan areas. In the Russian Far Eastern city of Neryungi, families waved goodbye to a large group of men as they boarded buses, footage posted on a community video channel showed. Many people are visibly emotional in the video, including a woman who cries and hugs her husband goodbye as he holds out his daughter’s hand from the bus window. Another shows a group of about 100 newly mobilized soldiers waiting at Magadan Airport in the Russian Far East, next to a transport aircraft. Telegram videos showed another mobilized group of men waiting for transport, allegedly in Amginskiy Uliss in the Yakutiya region, a vast region of Siberia. Much closer to the Ukrainian border, a crowd gathered near the city of Belgorod to drive out a batch of newly mobilized men. As they get on a bus, a boy yells “Bye, Dad!” and starts to cry. CNN could not independently verify the videos. In other scenes circulating on social media, tensions over conscription ran high. In Dagestan in the Caucasus, a furious argument broke out at a recruitment office, according to a video. One woman said her son had been fighting since February. Told by a man that he shouldn’t send him, he replied, “Your grandfather fought to live,” and the man replied, “Then it was war, now it’s politics.”
Defiance and detention
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday called on Russians to protest the partial military mobilization.
Thousands of Russian soldiers “died in this war in six months. Tens of thousands were injured and maimed. Do you want more? No? Then protest. Resist. Run away. Or surrender to Ukrainian captivity. These are options to survive.” Zelensky said in his daily video address to his country.
Addressing anti-war protests that erupted across Russia on Wednesday, the Ukrainian leader said: “(The Russian people) understand that they have been deceived.”
But dissent is usually quickly crushed in Russia, and authorities have placed further restrictions on free speech since the invasion of Ukraine.
Police quickly cracked down on Wednesday’s protests, which were mostly small-scale demonstrations. More than 1,300 people were arrested by authorities in at least 38 cities, according to the independent monitoring group OVD-Info.
Some of those protesters were immediately drafted into the army after their arrest, according to the organization’s spokeswoman Maria Kuznetsova, who told CNN by phone Wednesday that at least four police stations in Moscow were recruiting some of the arrested protesters.
Earlier this week, Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, amended the law on military service, making it punishable by up to 15 years in prison for violating military duties — such as desertion and desertion, according to state news TASS agency.
Ivan, the reservist who spoke to CNN after leaving the country this week, described the sense of hopelessness felt by many in Russia in the wake of recent events.
“I feel bad because a lot of my friends, a lot of people don’t support the war and feel threatened by what’s going on, and there’s no democratic way to actually stop it, even to protest,” he said.
CNN’s Gul Tuysuz, Yulia Kesaieva, Lauren Kent, Sugam Pokharel and Anastasia Graham Yooll contributed to this report.
