Front Burner - Anger over military draft grips Russia’s home front

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

From rare, violent protests to long lines at the border — and even a shooting at a draft office in Siberia — Russia remains gripped by anger over its first military mobilization since the Second World War. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the draft of hundreds of thousands of men last Wednesday, following significant military defeats in Ukraine's northeast. Simultaneously, Putin renewed threats of nuclear retaliation. And soon after, the Kremlin orchestrated referendums over independence in Eastern Ukraine which Western leaders have denounced as a sham. Today, the Guardian's Moscow correspondent Andrew Roth untangles why Putin is betting on this even more aggressive strategy in Ukraine, and what it could mean for his grip on the home front.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. These are protesters in the Russian region of Dagestan on Sunday. And they're demonstrating against what Russian President Vladimir Putin calls a partial mobilization, essentially a draft of hundreds of thousands of men to fight in Ukraine. Despite at least hundreds of arrests,

protests have continued across Russia since Putin's announcement last Wednesday, including rarely seen violence against Russian officers. including rarely seen violence against Russian officers. Elsewhere, there's been kilometers-long lines of border crossings as men try to escape conscription. The matter is not that we are afraid. The matter is that we don't like the situation. I do not like what they are doing in Ukraine. I feel sorry for our brothers.

I have many relatives in Ukraine, and I don't like this at all. It's an unstable moment for Russia at home, after a humbling month on the front lines. A surprise attack helped Ukrainian forces regain significant territory in the northeast. Russia is now staging referendums in eastern regions about seceding from Ukraine. And Putin is renewing his threats of nuclear retaliation. We're going to need an expert to sort through all of this. So thankfully, The Guardian Moscow correspondent Andrew Roth is joining me once again. He'll help us understand Putin's increasingly aggressive strategy and what few paths remain for an endgame.

Andrew, hey, it's really great to have you back. Thanks so much for making the time. Thank you so much for having me again. So we have so much to cover today from a draft to nuclear threats. But today, Tuesday, is also the last day of voting in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has organized referendums in four regions it's occupying. And what are these referendums supposedly going to tell us? So the idea of these quote unquote referendums is to decide whether or not these occupied territories are going to declare themselves independent and leave Ukraine. These aren't real referendums. They're not real votes. Really, what they're about is about creating legitimacy for Russia to be able to annex these territories. What they're doing right now is they're basically going through,

you know, basically a play of faking a vote and for Russia to say this area was Ukraine. The people have spoken and now it's Russia. Yeah. What is voting like actually look like? It depends on the region and where you are. There are parts of it that are made to look like a normal voting precinct or polling. Right. This is about creating a veneer of respectability, even if nobody believes what they're doing and nobody sees legitimacy in it. You have polling places, you have people going from door to door to pick up ballots.

You have a very simple ballot that has a big official stamp on it that says, you know, do you want to be part of Ukraine or not part of Ukraine? But, you know, there's a couple of things that really stand out. You know, one is that soldiers are often going door to door, picking up the votes with the voting commissions. Two is that, you know, people are being bussed in. We see Russian flags kind of being handed out. It's supposed to look like a party. And number three is just that, you know, in the end, we have no idea how the votes are counted. We have no idea how the ballots are kind of decided, who gets one, what the ballot rolls look like. And I think, you know, we are giving credit to something that doesn't really have any at all.

We just have to say that it's basically a farce. So I remember that Russia did pretty much the same thing, right, in Crimea in 2014, shortly before they annexed it. And I guess, why would announcing that they've annexed these territories matter? Like, what's the strategy behind officially annexing them? Because they basically already occupy them, right? Right, they do occupy them. And I think that it's important to start with what's going on inside the war, which is that Russia is losing territory and losing some of these territories pretty quickly at the moment. They're in trouble. You know, the Russians were pushed out of Kharkiv and it looks like the war is not going their way to a certain degree. Well, it's being described

as a possible turning point in the war in Ukraine. In a rapid march over the last week, Ukraine says it's forced Russians to retreat from strategic eastern towns around Kharkiv. In just five days, Ukrainian forces have retaken more territory than Russia had taken since April. They are retreating and they need a way to be able to stop Ukraine and trying to take back Ukrainian territory. One way is to win on the battlefield, but number two is what they're doing, which is annexing the territories, saying that this is Russia now. And if you're fighting here, you're not just fighting over some disputed territories that we're trying to take. You are attacking sovereign Russian territory. And in that case, you are risking full out war, you're risking a

nuclear response, if we think that the threat is high enough, and you're going to take this war to a whole nother level. And so the basic idea is that it is a threat. The annexations are supposed to make Ukraine think twice about retaking its own territory, liberating its cities, and it's supposed to force the other side to kind of come to the table. That doesn't look like it's going to happen, but that is the kind of logic behind it. And when Putin came out and described this last week, he said, if you attack Russian territory, you kind of face a nuclear response. I'd like to remind you that our country also has various weapons of destruction, and in certain aspects even more modern weapons than NATO countries.

If there's a threat to the territorial integrity of our country, in order to protect Russia and our people, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal. This is not a bluff. Now, somebody says that's not a bluff. Often it is a bluff. You know, people who actually aren't bluffing, you don't need to say that. Usually you just, you say the thing, right? You make the threat. But it's very clear that what they're trying to do is to try to slow down the Ukrainians. Right, right. And so I guess another way that Putin has kind of gone all in and is ratcheting things up is his announcement last week of what

he called a partial mobilization, right? And so what does that mean? And how does that work? How does that fit into what we're talking about here? Yeah, partial mobilization is what the military called it. We don't even know exactly how partial it is. But what mobilization is, it means that everybody in the country, but mainly men, are more or less eligible to be called up for military service. It means that you might come home one day and there's going to be a letter waiting for you in the mailbox that says that you have to report to your local military commission. You're going to be sent for training. And in a couple of weeks or a couple of months or whenever they deem fit, you're going to be sent for training. And, you know, in a couple of weeks or a couple of months, or whenever they deem fit, you are going to be sent to the war. You know, you can't

get out of it. If you run, and you're supposed to serve, you can serve 10 years in prison. Sometimes they close the borders in terms of mobilizations to prevent men from fleeing the country. Ukraine has done that since the beginning of the war and it looks like russia could do that as well and there's a lot of rumors about that right now uh and it means that for a lot of russians it's the first time i think that the war really touches home you know some people have been able to turn off and just try to ignore the war as callous as that sounds maybe they support it, maybe they don't, but in general, they didn't want to really break their routine. And I think that this week has kind of shattered that. And the day that this mobilization was announced, they claimed they would be taking 300,000 people. We don't know actually how many they will. These letters started being handed out across the

countries and regions and places, you know, from Kaliningrad and Moscow to little villages everywhere. And from my reporting, I can tell you that there are small villages in the middle of the country where every man in the village got a letter from the local military commission. You know, it's a village of 200 people and something like 40 men who are fighting it get a letter and tell me even more about how russians are reacting to it i think it depends totally where you are and who you are but i see pretty sad scenes kind of taking place across the country it doesn't feel very partial to the child in the background though watching their father board the bus.

You see a lot of families and people who didn't expect to have to go fight in this war, who don't think they should fight because they're not, you know, they don't have the right training, kind of being gathered up in these small cities and sent off. I got this summons according to which today I need to present myself for revision of my military registration. When I came in, I was given the notice according to which today at 3 p.m. I need to depart for the army. I've never served in the army.

I was never a conscript. I have no military experience. I will go. Do I have an alternative? I go today or I get criminally prosecuted. Usually it's poorer people because, you know, they don't fulfill certain criteria to get out of the war. And in some places you are seeing protests kind of break out because of that. So if you go on social media, you'll see 50, 100 people kind of gathering up around a small, it's called a военкомат in Russian, which is kind of like a military, a draft center or a military center in each town. And people really, you know, really going after these local officials who are taking people away. these local officials who are taking people away.

You know, they're yelling about, why are you taking our sons away? Why is this war taking place? You know, in some places, it's just about mobilization. Where are the experts? Where are the real soldiers? My husband shouldn't go. But in some places, you even see it growing into a question of why are we having this war in the first place? And I think that's quite scary, you know, for the people in charge for the Kremlin, because in the end of it, you know, we pay a lot of attention to

liberal protests in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg. I've gone to hundreds at this point since the time I've been here. And, you know, it's always maybe hundreds of people, maybe thousands, although not since the war. They kind of get arrested, they get pushed around quite a bit. But you know, they're kind of the liberal city set. And all of a sudden, you're in a really tough town, you know, somewhere in Dagestan, somewhere in Kabardina, Bulgaria, because people are not wealthy, and they don't have much to lose. And the situation is really volatile. That kind of blue collar working class protest is the thing that the country was always afraid of, that Putin was always afraid of. And we used to think it would be about the economy, but drafts are another good way of angering ordinary people.

I have friends who are running for the border and trying to get out of the country right now. Tell me a little bit more about your friends who are trying to flee because, you know, I've been seeing reports of tons of people trying to just get out. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a big country. It's 140 million people. And obviously, you know, they're not all going to run out of the country. Most don't have foreign passports. But if you send a lot of them to one place, you know, even tens of thousands of people, you start to get these massive scenes at the border. So what's happening is that there's not that many border points out of the country that are left open. European

countries have mostly closed their borders to Russia for a variety of reasons. Tickets on airlines have gotten super expensive. I'm seeing charter flights of like $10,000 for a ticket to Dubai tomorrow because people are worried the borders are about to close. And so what's left is to drive down to the south of the country and to try to drive across the border in Georgia, in the Caucasus, or to Kazakhstan, or into Mongolia. You know, the friends of mine who are going, I would say, are less, I'd say, less politically active than the kind of first set who went in February. Those were people who I think were either genuinely afraid of arrest because of their opposition to the war, or they were journalists,

were worried about freedom of speech, you know, because all of a sudden you had laws about not disrespecting or undermining the Russian army. And this is much more like, you know, there's a word in Russian, like мужики, they're more just like the regular dudes i would say probably didn't get that involved in protesting the war before this happened but now don't really want to have anything to do with it you know i'm talking with somebody now who has driven two days down to the kazakh border from moscow and is standing i think at an eight kilometer line at the border. And there are already these reports of people being sent back, depending on where you live, because your local military commission has said that, you know, Dmitry Ivanov is not supposed to leave the country or whatever your name is.

And so you kind of just get to the other line and then you hope that you get across. And they're really not going anywhere. They don't know where they're going. If you're Russian leaving the country right now, your money doesn't work outside the country because your bank cards have been cut off. A lot of places aren't giving visas at the moment. It can be quite daunting.

It's gone too far. What the government is asking of us. I don't want it. There are two choices. Either be drafted and go to the front, or refuse and go to prison. Everyone is wondering how to hide, how to escape the draft, how to go out as little as possible, because there are surveillance cameras. I would have commented on everything if I could,

but you know what could happen to me if I did. You mentioned how volatile things are. There was actually a shooting in a draft office this week, right? What do we know about the reason for that shooting? I believe it was in Siberia. Right. And what was most stunning was that it was caught on camera. So basically, it's a small draft office in the city called Ust-Ilimsk in Siberia. And a guy in camouflage walks directly up to a draft officer and shoots him right in the chest. And he goes down and everybody kind of runs out of the room screaming.

And it was, you know, a stunning moment that was published almost immediately. And apparently a second before it, he had said something along the lines of, nobody's going to war, we're all going home. And, you know, the story about what had happened was that this guy's, apparently his friend had received draft papers. He didn't have any military experience. And it seems like it touched him emotionally very strongly and and he grabbed you know it looks like a sawed-off shotgun and

went in and shot this guy there was this period on monday where there was just all this news kind of coming out where i felt like the country had suddenly gone crazy you know an hour before this i had seen that a man had set himself on fire uh in Razon at the bus station uh also yelling things against the war you know saying I don't want to go to war I don't want to take part in this war in Ukraine I've been to a lot of protests I've never seen something like that I've never seen somebody set himself on fire here or at least not for a very long time. So, you know, there are these very desperate protests and, you know, a kind of movement towards violence in order to oppose the draft. And the fact that this is just the fifth day of mobilization, this is before coffins

start coming back, before people are killed, speaks to what an emotional issue this is going to be. Andrew, you know, this sounds like a lot of domestic turmoil. And like you said, different kind of domestic turmoil than what the regime has faced in the past. But like, I can't even count the number of tweets or op-eds I've read during this war that say Putin's finished, right? Like the military humiliations, thousands, if not tens of thousands of Russian casualties, like people said he'll never hold on to power. But like how close is that to the reality of his grip on power, even with all this domestic upheaval right now? Yeah, it's really difficult to tell. I mean,

me and my colleagues at my own paper at The Guardian, you know, argue about this sometimes because some people, I think, want to see a kind of weakness and the possibility for change, where sometimes I don't think it's always there and that the possibilities aren't there. You know, we all have confirmation bias. We want to see things change. But you have to recognize that this is, you know, a regime that's been in power for 22 years. It's quite good at staying in power, you know, and for this to be the end of Putin, I think somebody really has to make it the end of Putin. It's not like he'll be embarrassed and just kind of step down, you know, after reading an op-ed or understanding in what a precarious situation he's kind of ended up, somebody has to step up and do something. You know who that is,

it doesn't seem very clear right now. I don't see mass protests yet in the country, although I see sparks of it in places like Dagestan where, you know, the government's obviously worried. I see thugs being sent out to beat up protesters and a lot more coercive measures being used, too. The other possibility is that within his own circle, he is becoming isolated and is in danger. I think that's always a possibility. It's obviously fraught with risk for the people who might decide to get rid of him. But I also think in that case, you case, we couldn't really expect maybe better things of the next person to come either. What does Russia look like after him? And is the next person going to want to stop the war? It's hard to tell, but it seems like the public is probably a

better bet for that than somebody inside the Kremlin. It's true the war isn't going their way but I still think that there needs to be a kind of act by somebody who's opposed to him either in the elite or in public to kind of sweep him aside and I don't see that yet. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not

know their own household income? That's not a typo, a question that requires you to have some sort of crystal ball. But given all you know about what's happening right now, what do you think the most likely route is from here? Where does this go from here? I think we stay in this conflict for a long time. I think to a certain degree, I don't think the Russians are really actually going to be able to take a ton of territory in the near future. They're going to try to wear down Western interest in fighting the war, in supporting Ukraine. Maybe they'll try to wear down Ukraine itself through economic tools just by spending a

long time. Russia can field maybe hundreds of thousands of these soldiers or millions to make it difficult to push them back. And what that points towards is maybe not a frozen conflict, but one that where the borders are more or less in the same place, you know, and one that continues to be dangerous, but one that doesn't really move one way or the other. I don't think Russia can abandon this war at this point after the annexations. I don't see how it can negotiate. So i feel like all that's left to do is to just keep on keeping on and uh ukraine likewise can can't abandon you know its territories it has to keep fighting for what's its own and it needs to keep encouraging the west to support it

to provide what it needs you know weaponry economic support i mean that just speaks to me like a kind of recipe for a kind of permanent war that is gonna remain in the same place and maybe without any kind of formal ceasefire anywhere in the near future it's really hard i think to ask the ukrainians to do that so when it comes down to it you know what i see in the future is unfortunately more of the same but that said you know we've been surprised so many times before that we kind of just have to wait and see. Okay. Andrew, thank you.

As always, this was really great. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

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