Russia is experiencing a surge of protests against President Vladimir Putin’s demand for “partial mobilisation” in places with significant concentrations of ethnic minorities. According to analysts, this strategy undermines the legitimacy of the Russian government among these groups and is likely to deliver Russia poorly motivated soldiers for its conflict with Ukraine.
Protesters succeeded in stopping traffic on September 25 in the Caucasian Dagestan area of Russia close to the Georgian border. A group named the Free Buryatia Foundation has been established to assist reservists evade the “partial mobilisation” Putin promised after Ukraine’s lightning advances in the east, more than 7,000 kilometres away in the Buryatia area near the Mongolian border.
Putin’s proposals encountered severe opposition in the remote Arctic province of Yakutia in northeastern Siberia as well.
“Disparate price” being paid by minorities
The latter rallying cry reflects a growing concern that, in order to send additional troops to Ukraine, Moscow is unfairly targeting ethnic minorities and residents of Russia’s poorest regions.
The mobilisation in Buryatia, according to Alexandra Garmzhapova, president of the Free Buryatia Foundation, is not biassed. One of Russia’s most underdeveloped regions is Buryatia.
Moscow has forced the Tatar minority in Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014, to enlist first. Russian writer and activist Osman Pashaev noted on Facebook that “Crimean Tatars were issued 80% of summonses for mobilisation in Crimea.”
It is evident that ethnic minorities in the poorest areas are paying a disproportionate price, not just for the mobilisation effort but also for other factors.
Moscow does not disclose all of its front-line casualties. Stephen Hall, a Russia expert at Bath University, continued, “even with the limited official information, you can see that regions with big ethnic minorities – such as Buryatia or the [nearby] Tuva region – have lost a lot more men compared to their entire population than Russia’s core regions.”
Social and economic factors contribute to this inequality. According to Caress Schenk, a political scientist at Nazarbayev University in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, “In those districts, the relatively good compensation the Russian military gives is sometimes the only way out of poverty.” Because of this, Hall remarked that these outlying people were overrepresented in the Russian army “even before the war in Ukraine.”
“Partial mobilisation” by Putin
