The “partial mobilization” decreed by Vladimir Putin last week to bolster the war effort in Ukraine and announced last Wednesday during a speech to the Russian people is bound to turn out to be very partial. In fact, far from arousing the enthusiasm of the multitudes, the Kremlin’s order provoked numerous oppositions.
261,000 Russians on the run
Although this enlistment of the reservists was intended to send 300,000 men to fight on the front, an internal note from Russian intelligence, the FSB, revealed by the daily Novaya Gazeta, established that 261,000 men had fled since the presidential speech. A career that takes them to bordering countries, such as Georgia (where the number of deserters is estimated at more than 100,000), Kazakhstan, Finland or Mongolia.
In addition, the demonstrations – limited in scale but significant in a context as authoritarian as the Russian regime – are multiplying. The Russian NGO OVD Info, which covers these protests, has already registered more than 2,300 arrests on the sidelines of the processions against the mobilization.
dramatic refusals
And the refusal to take up arms sometimes takes a more tragic turn. On Monday, an unemployed 25-year-old shot a recruiting officer at a mobilization center in Ust-Imlinsk in Siberia as he was giving his first instructions to new arrivals. According to the mother of the suspect, who was arrested at the scene while his victim was hospitalized, the latter had been “very sad” ever since his best friend received his call-up to the army.
Even more dramatically spectacular: this Sunday, a man set himself on fire at a bus stop in Ryazan, screaming that he did not want to go to the front. If he could be taken to a health center, his skin is 90% burned.
In total, and according to a count provided by the Russian independent media midzone54 recruitment centers or military administration premises have been set on fire since the start of the war, and the trend has worsened since Vladimir Putin’s speech: in five days 17 fires have been started, including attacks with Molotov cocktails as in Mordovia , or in Gatchina, very close to St. Petersburg, the autocrat’s hometown.
The “mistakes” of power
Kremlin critics see it as a resounding denial for the government. “It proves two things. First, the negligence, the disorder that exists at the top of power. It is agony. Putin has no road map. He tries to save his skin but the ground gives way under his feet. “The slingshot is rising in Russia. There is a change in Russian opinion because the Russians do not want to die for Putin,” Franco-Russian geopolitician Alexandre Melnik, a former Soviet diplomat, judged on our set on Monday night.
“This is not a great patriotic war, this is Putin’s war, not Russia’s,” he concludes.
General Jérôme Pellistrandi, advisor to the BFMTV on military matters, sees these rebellions as a turning point in the Russian landscape. “In Russian history, the Russian people have always suffered. We go to war because a bayonet pushes us in the back. There is a form of passivity, of submission to authority,” he remarks on Tuesday with BFMTV.com.
Recruits with surprising profiles
The Russian power did not seek to deny the rise of these rebels. Thus, Margarita Simonian, editor in chief of RT, which is the sounding board of the media, even justified them on Twitter, pointing out that the contract tacitly made between citizens and the executive regarding this “partial mobilization” had been violated. .
“The rule that rank-and-file soldiers, foremen, non-commissioned officers and midshipmen under the age of 35, as well as junior officers under the age of 45 and senior officers under the age of 60, must be mobilized first is not respected. “, he analyzes.
All the less respected by the presence in the centers of students without any military experience, of mature men or even of sick people more apt to reform than to fight.
The Kremlin even admitted these failures, but attributed them to occasional mistakes. “These discrepancies with the determined criteria are being resolved. We hope that these errors will be corrected quickly,” Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Russian presidency, said on Monday.
a broken trust
However, according to General Pellistrandi, the evil is deeper and not anecdotal. The phenomenon is too broad, too variable to be just a collection of accidents.
“Until now we have not protested against the war because it does not concern us,” confesses the military expert.
For him, this malaise is due above all to the very organization of the Russian mobilization system. “In 2008, Vladimir Putin switched to a professional army model, with volunteers and conscription maintenance (military service, editor’s note) related to the enlistment of 130,000 men, with an auxiliary role. And the students could escape this conscription. As a result, military service only affected young people from remote areas. So, until now it was not a problem, there was no dispute because the urban youth did not care. Now it becomes a problem.”
Recipes for a successful mobilization
Is this the only problem for Russian society in 2022, embroiled in a conflict that it does not want, or is it the very principle of universal mobilization in the sense that we are always and everywhere looking to escape?
A look at the course of the world teaches us that a mobilization can take place without setbacks, at least if it is not improvised. General Jérôme Pellistrandi takes as proof of this the mobilization – general and not partial – of France at the beginning of the First World War.
“What was decided on August 1, 1914 is 99.9% fulfilled. There was no controversy, quite the opposite. These are men who have done military service, ”he recalls.
“It was very well organized. The posters had been prepared, all that remained was to put the date. And all the men had their military notebook where they told them where to go.” The French example is even double: “in 1939, we are not enthusiastic. We go there out of duty but we take the same model, and there is no desertion, except for some communists”.
The French enlistment also had its failures
The mobilization train can be derailed for three reasons: when it is poorly prepared, but also when it faces a political headwind or uses overly repressive means. The war in Algeria is a good textbook case.
“From 1954-1955, the problem became political, with divisions between pro-French Algeria and supporters of other solutions, and this affected the soldiers and their families”, describes Jérôme Pellistrandi, who adds, however, that we are not in the framework of a mobilization
“We sent the contingent, that is to say that it is the soldiers who serve in mainland France who go to Algeria with their unit.”
The echo of Vietnam
For the officer, it is better to cross the Atlantic to find an echo of the current Russian impasse: “We can draw a parallel with the Vietnam War. In the early 1960s, the Americans sent military advisers. But from the moment that we send young people, the subject becomes political”.
Demonstrations, departures to Canada: there is no lack of ways to oppose. Others manage to avoid deployment without losing face. “George W. Bush will be a pilot in the National Guard, for example, which allows him not to go to Vietnam,” says the general.
However, the US-Russian comparison quickly hits its limits. In the first place, the specialization launched by the United States means that, according to our interlocutor, “it is estimated that one in ten mobilized Americans fights at the front, while in Russia it is really infantry.” Additionally, hostility to enlistment for Southeast Asia is part of an undercurrent of student protest, the events of 1968, and the rise of the era-specific counterculture. However, from Moscow to Vladivostok, we don’t know such a collective emotion these days.
“In Russia, we are more into an individual avoidance strategy,” continues our expert.
General opposition against partial mobilization?
It remains to be seen whether Russian discontent can take the next step and become widespread. “We don’t know. By themselves, these individual strategies could come together, especially if there is more opposition from mothers and women around the recruits, but we have to be careful about the ability of the movement to shake the regime.” concludes General Jérôme Pellistrandi.
The power of Vladimir Putin and the fate of the war he unleashed are definitely at a crossroads.
Source: BFM TV
