Mobilization summary for October 9-10
The Crimean authorities proposed to ban men liable for military duty from leaving Russia, said Volodymyr Konstantinov, the Chairman of the State Council of “the Republic of Crimea”.
Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia, commented on the ongoing mobilization; according to him, "mobilization is going on in the way it may go in a country where it has not been announced for 80 years - there is true patriotism as well as standard sloppiness." Russian President Vladimir Putin agrees with him. He believes that the announced mobilization is a good reason to resolve the problems in this area that have been accumulating for a long time.
The State Duma (lower chamber of Russian parliament) Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has again warned his fellow-citizens, who had left the country, calling them traitors.
And the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin announced new measures of supporting the mobilized entrepreneurs. As he said, according to a new law the mobilized citizens will have the ability to keep their businesses and will get a five days deferral to arrange their business affairs. The deadlines for paying taxes, insurance premiums and other compulsory payments will be extended for them. Also the extension of terms of providing declarations on taxes and other mandatory reporting is envisaged for the mobilized. Entrepreneurs can also apply for the so-called “loan vacations” and a deferment of rental payments.
Bankers in their turn addressed the Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu with a request of “speeding up the process of approving the lists of bank employees, who are supposed to be exempt from the mobilization, in order to ensure the uninterrupted functioning of the Russian financial system”. The Russian Central Bank has already sent the lists of the credit institutions` employees to the Ministry of Defense on September 30. “However, the credit institutions, whose employees were included in the lists, haven't received a confirmation of being provided with draft postponements”.
The State Duma (lower chamber of Russian parliament) Deputy, Edinaya Rossiya (Unified Russia) party rep. Andrey Kolesnik proposed to equip the mobilized with vatniks (a padded cotton wool jacket used by Soviet soldiers in WW2 and Gulag inmates and, incidentally, a derogatory term for pro-Kremlin Russian nationalists), criticizing the standard uniform along the way: “The uniform we have now is not very good, the material must be breathing, but not this one, which turns into glass in the cold. Winter is coming, earlier they used to fight in vatniks (WWII), even these are more comfortable:.
In Yekaterinburg, reservation from mobilization has become one of the advantages employers offer to prospective candidates.
Draft offices keep applying their own understanding to existing laws and rules. This time the military commissar of Chita district of the Zabaykalski region has disclosed his own vision. In particular, he states that a citizen “is obliged to come to a draft office on the call from the military commissar” without any draft notice, allegedly.
After the information about the erroneous mobilization of the IT specialist Aleksandr Kulakov was published, the man was released and went home. Kulakov, whom we mentioned in yesterday’s summary, hasn’t served in the military and has been issued postponement orders from the Ministry of Digital Development.
A category 2 disabled person was applying for an international passport at a local government service desk when an attempt was made to serve him with call up papers instead. The man refused the “offer” despite threats from the (female) clerk.
The governor of the Orel Region Andrei Klychov informed that the region will resume dispatching the mobilzed men on October 12. Several of the districts of Ekaterinburg will resume sending out the recruits on October 13. The draft offices in other districts inform the summoned men that they need to prepare for their departure “as soon as possible.” Despite the Krasnoyarsk regional administration's claim of having met their mobilization quota, call up papers are still being served to the region's residents.
The “Where summons are being issued in Udmurtia” Telegram channel makes a claim (yet unconfirmed) that 2300 residents of the republic could be mobilized by October 20.
Radiy Khabirov, the head of Bashkortostan, informed there won’t be a second wave of mobilization in the region and that the mobilization in Bashkiria is almost over at this point. That means that the mobilization campaign will continue for some time but the second wave of the mobilization is not expected.
The process of mass dispatching of the newly mobilized to “the locations of their assigned combat missions” of or to training detachments have commenced. A video has appeared that shows mobilized men from Bashkiria marching in a huge column. Buses and KamAZ trucks took the new recruits out of Tambov Region. Vice-Admiral Victor Liina, the commander of the Baltic Fleet, attended the send-off ceremony of the mobilized from the Kaliningrad Region who are expected to be transported out by air. The Voronezh regional governor stated that men mobilized in the Voronezh and Belgorod Regions are being dispatched to the places of their combat missions today. This undertaking is now on video (1, 2). Footage of the mobilized being sent off is coming from Saratov and other regions.
A video recording has emerged where some (Russian) servicemen are saying they have been conscripted 11 days ago and, without the necessary training, have been shipped straight to the town of Svatove (on the territory of the so-called DPR). According to new unconfirmed information, new draftees from the Kamyshin district of the Volgograd region (in Russia) are already near Kherson. There is also information about the new draftees from the Khabarovsk region having been sited in the same area.
The Governor of Novosibirsk region made a decision to dip into the region's reserve draft assistance fund to pay the conscripts 100 000 rubles each. According to the newly announced 2 000 men per region mobilization quota, this initiative will cost the region at least 2 million rubles.
New draftees from the Russian constituent Republic of Kalmykia, having arrived in their new bases in Volgograd and Ingushetia, brought with them their own consignment of uniforms and necessary tactical gear. Residents from the Engels District in the Saratov region baked 2 500 pirozhki (fried buns with meat filling) for the new conscripts. Besides the food, the town's residents have supplied the soldiers with portable radios, sleeping bags, tactical gloves, medication, a mini drone, a chain saw and a welding kit. In the Kursk region, every family, whose member was conscripted, will be assigned a curator.
Krasnoobsk's mothers (in the Novosibirsk region), whose husbands or male partners have been drafted, have been asked to post about it in their children's kindergarten Internet chat, even if the man was not living at home at the time. When they enquired as to the reason, they were sent a government communication that this information is required in order to compile a report for the facilities' dietician. Details about similar requests are coming from Omsk.
Despite the dejection amongst the (Russian) President's Office staff, associated with the Ministry of Defense announcement about canceling of the New Year’s celebrations, the initiative is gathering momentum in the outer regions of Russia. "Let's cancel all celebrations and allocate the saved-up funds to conscripts and their families" said the Head of the Russian constituent Chuvashia Republic, Oleg Nikolaev. Some of the Tomsk's municipal funds will also go towards helping conscripts and their families.
Secondary school students of School #121 in the city of Snezhinsk, Chelyabinsk region, refused to buy New Year's gifts in order to transfer all the collected money to the needs of the mobilized. And schoolchildren from Kopeysk made amulet bag necklaces for the mobilized. The campaign "Knitting socks for soldiers" has started in Chelyabinsk. Also, according to the decree of the governor of Chelyabinsk region, all children of the mobilized will receive 20,000 roubles.
The Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov continues his public activities. Following his statements, in which he declared that 60,000 Chechen fighters together with his teenage children are ready to go to the front, Colonel General Kadyrov announced that 500 medical workers from Chechnya are willing to volunteer.
A court in St. Petersburg has taken into custody Maxim Asriyan, who is suspected of an attempt to set a military commissariat in the southern part of the city on fire.
A resident of Moscow filed a lawsuit against the FSB [the Federal Security Service] to challenge the ban on travel abroad. He had received a notification of the ban on September 25 trying to cross the Russia-Georgia border at the Verkhniy Lars checkpoint. After the claimant appealed to a court, the military commissar at the place of the man's registration stated that the commissariat did not make any lists of people prohibited from leaving and did not transmit any information to the Border Service of the FSB. It should be noted that on October 9, the man flew abroad from Sochi International Airport.
The governor of Irkutsk region Igor Kobzev announced that he tested positive for Covid. On October 7-8, Kobzev visited residents of Irkutsk region taken to military camps in Kemerovo and Novosibirsk regions. At the Shilovo training ground located in Novosibirsk region, he was seen not wearing a mask.