Protests against the military mobilization announced by Vladimir Putin continue. Several videos shared on social media show the violent clashes that took place this Sunday in Makhachkala, the regional capital of Dagestan, between police and protesters as the crowd shouted “no to war”.
The crowd, almost exclusively women, was confronted by police elements in protest at the president’s decision to send hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers to fight in the Ukrainian war. A video showed a group of women chasing an officer at a recruiting center, with one of them yelling: “Why are they taking our children? Who was attacked? Was Russia attacked? They didn’t come to us. We were the ones who attacked Ukraine. Russia attacked Ukraine! Stop the war!”
Several other films show violent confrontations, including police officers trying to arrest people sitting on top of them to immobilize them. The OVD-Info group, which is following the protests and providing legal assistance to detainees, said it was concerned about reports of “violent detentions” in the Dagestan region and denounced the use of stun weapons. Footage obtained by the group also shows police officers firing live weapons into the air as they tried to disperse protesters, who were blocking a road.
In an effort to calm the mood, Dagestan governor Sergei Melikov admitted on Telegram this Sunday that “mistakes have been made and that “partial mobilization must be carried out strictly according to criteria announced by the president”.
Russia’s first military deployment since World War II sparked protests in dozens of cities across the country. Expressions of discontent were most effusive in poorer and minority ethnic regions, such as Dagestan, a Muslim-majority region on the shores of the Caspian Sea in the mountainous north of the Caucasus.
Dagestan suffered more casualties than any other Russian province in the conflict, according to a BBC report. Officially, at least 301 soldiers had died in the region by early September, ten times as many as in the capital Moscow, for example.
Unauthorized gatherings are considered illegal under Russian anti-protest laws and are thus rare outside major cities. Despite this, according to the OVD-Info group, more than 2,000 people have been arrested at anti-mobilization rallies in Russia since Putin announced the move, which the Kremlin called the “partial mobilization”… of 300,000 military reservists.
Source: DN
