Photo: Associated Press
In Russia, it is not Muscovites and St. Petersburg residents who are forced to fight, and definitely not Russians, "small" peoples are Putin's main mobilization foundation.
Protests against mobilization in Dagestan, Buryats flee to Mongolia, even in Chechnya occupied by Kadyrov - not everything is so smooth either. False criminal proceedings, kidnappings, bribes, and blackmail - are the features of Chechen military recruiting, according to TSN.
In the republic, anti-mobilization resistance is brutally suppressed and the full power of the punitive machine is thrown to drive people to war with Ukraine, the Chechen opposition says.
Since the beginning of the war, about 8,000 soldiers have been sent from the Republic of Chechnya as part of the so-called "Kadyrovites" detachments to the war in Ukraine. Less than half of them are ethnic Chechens, says the head of the Chechen opposition movement. "They can't even recruit from their own Kadyrovites. They collect from all regions of Russia. An advertising postcard was hung in Volgograd saying that they are recruiting in the Chechen Republic," says Ibragim Yangulbaev, head of the Chechen opposition movement Adat.
With the announcement of mobilization in Chechnya, they began to drag everyone into the departments indiscriminately from the streets, says Ibragim Yangulbaev. Men are blackmailed with articles to sign up for the army. "They kidnap some people, under those articles - for drugs, for robberies, under petty articles that do not relate to extremism. They are kidnapped and they also say that you are going to Ukraine, if you don't go there, we will torture you, fabricate a criminal case and send him to prison for five years,†adds Yangulbaev.
Most of the men in the video from the conscription station in Chechnya the day after the announcement of mobilization there under duress, human rights activists say. Cases of the kidnapping of relatives and torture are known. This is mainly done by the leadership of local police departments and military registration and enlistment offices, especially in rural areas. Moreover, they turned the right to refuse to participate in someone else's war into a business. "These abductees are given an ultimatum: either you pay 300,000 rubles, or we will send them to Ukraine," the oppositionist assures.
For those who have received a summons under the law, the fee is higher: up to a million rubles. People take bank loans to "buy off a relative from a business trip to Ukraine."
Until recently, this was done in silence. However, after the massive delivery of subpoenas, even the relatives of “full-time Kadyrovitesâ€, who have already traveled to Ukraine several times, do not hide their indignation. In Grozny, women even tried to gather for a rally. However, half an hour before it began - all those present on the square, and this is about one and a half hundred people, mostly women - were loaded into police vans. Kadyrov immediately stated that the rally was brewing unpopular and paid for by the event.
The next day, the sons of these women were kidnapped and forced to sign documents on a voluntary trip to Ukraine. "This is the extermination and genocide of the Chechen people by Russia. Why - because the Chechens have always wanted and demanded their independence for three hundred years," says Ibragim Yangulbaev.
And he adds: real Chechens who want to fight do it on the side of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, because Russia is a common enemy for us.
