Summary of the mobilization in Russian Federation, October 3-4

Russia's Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, announced that more than 200 000 new draftees (conscripted during the "partial" mobilization process) have now joined the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and are now being trained in the country's 6 instruction centers and 80 training grounds. He also assured that the currently enlisted conscripts [the one drafted in the regular biannual call-ups] will go home after their enlistment term ends and the next (Autumn) batch will be joining non-combat units only (will not go to war). He also paid particular attention to how "it is necessary to quickly deliver correct exemption information to conscription officials (in charge of the "partial" mobilization). The following categories are currently exempt from conscription: fathers, whose child (or children) has been diagnosed with an untreatable disease and fathers with three children, one of which is disabled."

The Federation Council of Russia approved a conscription employment guarantee law. The law guaranties their current employment to everyone who has been conscripted. They will be able to return to their current place of work after their conscription is no longer required. The Council also approved the "credit holiday" law for the draftees participating in the "special operation".

The Gosuslugi e-government portal has introduced two services associated with the mobilization. The first option deals with those who want to volunteer and the second is for people who want to file a complaint that they were conscripted wrongly. According to Russia's deputy prime minister, Dmitry Chernyshenko, more than 2 000 people used Gosuslugi to sign up as volunteers.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of the RF has put together a detailed list of categories of Russian citizens which are currently exempt from conscription. They explained that Russian public servants who are currently in reserve can also apply for exemption.

Several Moscow local police chiefs immediately forbade their staff from visiting conscription offices. Even though they were issued with draft letters. Law enforcement personnel who received the letters were promised "the issue will be taken care of". Although public servants and police are exempt, it appears that Moscow's emergency services personnel are lured into signing the draft letters and are forced to go to the conscription office.

The new conscripts from Tomsk, currently located at the Belgorod region on the border with Ukraine, have been assigned to the 24th Separate Guard Special Operations Brigade of the GRU. This GRU brigade had already fought in Ukraine and lost at least 21 soldiers, including 4 officers. Other draftees are shipped directly to the front lines in Svatove, Luhansk region. As we reported earlier, commercial airliners are being used to ship draftees off to war. A Twitter user spotted data from Flightradar24, which pointed to planes of the Ural Airlines making multiple flights to the Platov International Airport (in Rostov-on-Don), which has been closed off since the 24th of February (2022). A Russian commander who goes by the lovely callsign of "Cannibal" is already expecting his first batch of new draftees at the front line. Since the 19th of September, the man's unit has lost all but 7 soldiers, out of the 23.

The regional authorities of the Russian Federation began to publish the first official government contracts for the supply of the mobilized. So, according to the public procurement website, the authorities of Mari El are going to spend at least 6.49 million rubles on combat gear and military clothes. At the same time, the mobilized of Mari El ask to send them money at least for cigarettes. The mayor's office of Zarinsk (the Altai Territory) signed a contract for 480,000 rubles for the transportation of conscripts to the assembly place in Omsk. In the Amur region, the transportation of the mobilized from Svobodny to Blagoveshchensk on ten buses cost 300,000 rubles.

The authorities of the Altai Territory have announced the size of the allowance for the mobilized – 200 thousand rubles per month. Also, the reservists are promised financial assistance in purchasing clothes, sleeping bags and other accessories at the expense of non-budgetary sources, funds, non-governmental organizations, and businesses.

At this very time, mobilized men in the village of Svetly of the Omsk region asked the authorities to send the promised one-off payments to their families. Sakhalin officials ordered to give to the families of the mobilized 5 kilograms of fish per person.

A mobilized man from the training center in Yelan of the Sverdlovsk region, where three men died the other day, told the TVRain channel the details of what is happening in this center. In particular, instead of real training, the mobilized are taught to march. At the same time, in the Saratov region, the mobilized practiced an "ambush" on civilian cars passing by. New photos showing the training of the recently mobilized at the training grounds in the Rostov and Tula regions are published. Following his colleagues, the governor of the Novosibirsk region Andrey Travnikov visited the mobilized from his region. It should be noted that, judging by the published photos, they will be trained on outdated T-62M tanks.

Today it became known that another mobilized person died at a the military base in Omsk. The cause of death of the man from Krasnoyarsk has not yet been identified. The wife of the deceased said that her husband was threatened during a conflict with other mobilized men. Also in Omsk, information about a ban on the sale of alcohol appeared at the entrance to one of the stores. Prohibition will last until at least October 30. Such measures were introduced near the Novosibirsk Military School and in one of the districts of Yekaterinburg.

Veterans of the war in Afghanistan and other military conflicts are involved in the training of the mobilized on Sakhalin. The governor of the Sakhalin region set the task for officials to ensure that those mobilized from the Kuriles and Sakhalin were the best equipped in Russia. At the same time, a trolley was installed in a store in the Karelian town of Kem to collect aid for the mobilized. People in Kalmykia collect aid for the mobilized countrymen who are in Volgograd and Ingushetia. Relatives and friends of those mobilized from the Ordynsky district of the Novosibirsk region handed over food and toilet paper, which is in deficit in Akademgorodok, where the mobilized are located. At the same time, information appeared on the Объясняем.рф government website that mobilized should not buy anything at their own expense, since the Ministry of Defense fully provides the mobilized with everything necessary for service. Mobilized officers from the Orenburg region complained to the President about the conditions and insults at the 631st training center in Saratov. The mobilized guys from Bashkortostan complain that they were settled in a "bughouse". According to sources in the RF Armed Forces, several mobilized regiments do not have an integrated medical unit. It is easier to find tanks and armored personnel carriers for them than people with medical skills. This has already affected the morale of troops.

The regions that completed the first stage of "partial" mobilization were joined by Karelia and the Volgograd region. No sooner had the Arkhangelsk region been among the regions that completed the first stage of mobilization, as the residents of Arkhangelsk again began to receive draft notices. In other regions, mobilization is in full swing. Three convicts were called up in Perm as part of the mobilization. The husband of a woman pregnant with twins, Alena Klinova, from Dzerzhinsk was mobilized and immediately sent to the Bryansk region. In the village of Ovsyanka, Amur Region, a father of three children and the only earner in the family was mobilized. A 47-year-old electrician with no combat experience was mobilized in Penza. And in Surgut, a draft notice was handed to a single father. “He did not have a draft deferment, he did not have health issues, he did complete a military course at university,” this is how the administration of the Azov district of the Rostov region commented on a mobilization of Yevgeny Nikipelov, a 43-year-old village teacher. Now the man is already in the special military operation area, according to his wife. On Sakhalin Island, a resident of the Tymovsky District, blind in one eye, was mobilized. Buses full of the mobilized departed from Tyumen, Chelyabinsk and Kazan. In Pushkino, no one opened an entrance door to a representative of the military recruitment office, so the woman had to climb in through a window. Meanwhile, a military commissar [head of recruitment office] of St. Petersburg is threatening citizens refusing draft notices with criminal prosecution, although in accordance with the law, this may result in a misdemeanor fine only.

Since the “partial” mobilization has been announced in Russia, from 600,000 to 1 million people have left the country, according to Forbes. More than 200,000 of them have entered Kazakhstan, and 147,000 have left, according to the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. At the same time, the head of the Astrakhan region claimed that after the deployment of a mobilization point on the border of the Astrakhan region and Kazakhstan, the number of people wishing to cross it "went to naught." And in the Pskov region, mobile recruiting stations were deployed on the borders with Latvia and Estonia, Governor Mikhail Vedernikov said. Nikolai Valuev, a State Duma member, felt ashamed for seeing a mass exodus from Russia of "deserters fleeing to Georgia from a partial mobilization." Recall that the lawmaker himself received a draft notice on September 29.

Sirena Telegram channel updated the arson map. Two yesterday's cases were added: from Kazan and Krasnoyarsk.