The criminal war as such does not outrage them. The war itself completely suits them all. They love this war. They just don’t like that their slave husbands are kept at the front for too long without leave.

How did that line go? Whether you like it or don’t like it, bear with it, my beauty.

Source: KOLOKOL XXI (Telegram), 8 July 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. Specifically, the women in this video appeal to Vladimir Putin ask that men who are mobilized to fight in Ukraine (as their husbands and sons were, allegedly, in September 2022) should spend no more than six months at the front and should be relieved by “trained reserves as soon as possible”: “Our men need R&R. Send our men back home,” says one of the women. The woman shown holding a baby, at the end of the video, suggests that the mobilized men be relieved by some of the “over four and a half million professionals” serving in the Emergencies Ministry, the Interior Ministry (i.e., the police), and the regular army. Nevertheless, the women unambiguously voice their support for the “special military operation,” while claiming that their own “lives are hell.”

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Russian troops at the front are severely depleted due to the lack of rotation, which in turn is caused by a shortage of reserves, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in the United States. Meanwhile, the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, radiates optimism on this score. At a meeting to discuss reinforcing the Russian armed forces with contract soldiers, held the other day, Medvedev claimed that, according to the Defense Ministry, over 185,000 men had enlisted in the Russian army over the past six months, during the period 1 January to 4 July 2023.

Data from various sources suggest that a significant portion of Russia’s current contingent of “contract soldiers” consists not so much of men who for one reason or another (usually financial, less often ideological) actually have volunteered to go to fight in Ukraine, as of men who have been turned into mercenaries under contract in a “voluntary-compulsory” manner.

We have already reported that, judging by Rosstat’s numbers on migration flows in the Russian Federation in 2022, Tajik nationals have been forced to “volunteer” in this fashion. And this includes not only Tajiks who, by an unfortunate coincidence, came to Russia to work in 2022 and now can only come return to Russia via the front line in Ukraine, and from there go home either in a plastic bag or in a wheelchair. Attempts are underway to make “volunteers” of Tajiks who have not left their country and had no plans to leave, but who are forcibly mobilized into the Russian army by the government of their native Tajikistan.

It seems, however, that although the Russian leadership is running out of Tajiks, it intends to keep fighting for a long time. For this reason, it could find no better solution than to forcibly reclassify young men already conscripted in Russia itself as “contract soldiers.” This campaign, apparently, has also enjoyed only fair to middling success. Moreover, so much so that the authorities are now not only forcing mostly previously untouchable young Muscovites to join the army (and in the current circumstances this actually means sending them to the front), but even those residents of the capital who have papers certifying them as unfit for military service on medical grounds.

The Telegram channel of the human rights organization Soldiers’ Mothers of St. Petersburg relates the story of nineteen-year-old Muscovite Andrei B. Armed with medical certificates that should have enabled him to receive a reprieve from the army (in particular, he needs surgery due to a joint disease), Andrei and his lawyers went to the military enlistment office in Moscow’s Izmailovsky District. However, the enlistment officers immediately confiscated Andrei’s [internal] passport, forbade him from using his phone, and kicked his lawyers out into the street. Basically, Andrei was forcibly captured by the Russian National Guard and held by its officers inside the military enlistment office. Summoned by Andrei’s lawyers, the police who arrived at the scene assisted the Guardsmen, rather than the young man, who was being held by force. Andrei became ill when his blood sugar spiked. An ambulance crew summoned by the lawyers were not allowed to attend to the young man.

Consequently, according to the post on Soldiers’ Mothers Telegram channel, “assisted by the Russian National Guard, the young man, who could barely stand on his feet, was escorted to the assembly point, where neither his mother nor his lawyers were admitted. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to secure the young man’s release from the assembly point.”

According to Soldiers’ Mothers, such cases are widespread. On the same day, a dozen more young Muscovites were sent to the assembly point from this same enlistment office alone.

In fact, we are witnessing the next wave of a covert “partial mobilization.”

There are two significant points about this story. The first is that nearly all the forcibly mobilized young men had medical reprieve certificates and went to the military enlistment offices with their lawyers, who, in turn, had been provided to them by human rights organizations. In this regard, the naivety of human rights activists, including the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers, and commentators of this story on social media, who have been outraged by the “violations of the rights” of young men thus “shanghaied” into the army, cannot help but astonish us.

The second point is that the large-scale dispatch of Muscovites into combat suggests that the regime has fewer and fewer human resources available to it. The quality of these mobilizable reserves is questionable, however.

Bloomberg identifies convicts and Kadyrov’s Chechen fighters as two other additional sources for replenishing the Russian army’s manpower.

Of course, the Russian Defense Ministry can continue to recruit convicts, but the numbers and quality of these soldiers will steadily decrease. This is simply because the numbers of murderers, robbers, and rapists who have already been killed or seriously injured, and whom Prigozhin prioritized over other residents of prisons and penal colonies, since they had the specific relevant “background,” have for obvious reasons greatly decreased. As we recall, Prigozhin himself claimed that 20,000 Wagner fighters, half of whom were ex-convicts, had been killed in the battles for Bakhmut alone.

The number of Chechen soldiers whom Kadyrov is willing to send to the front is also limited, since he has to maintain significant forces in Chechnya itself, both to protect his own clan from possible uprisings, and in case of “unforeseen” circumstances during which the federal center would be greatly weakened and he would finally deem it possible to declare himself an independent sovereign. Whatever the case, Kadyrov has cited two figures: 7,000 of his loyalists already in the combat zone and an additional 2,400 men undergoing training. Slim pickings, as the saying goes.

The quality of these “TikTok warriors” is also questionable. Not because Chechens don’t know how to fight. They do know how to fight, as they proved in both Chechen wars, in 1994–1996 and 1999–2004. But this is not their war.

Sooner or later, a significant percentage of Russian soldiers will reach the same conclusion.

Source: Alexander Zhelenin, “Hidden mobilization wave reaches Moscow as quality of Russian army’s manpower continues to decline,” Republic, 8 July 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. The emphasis, above, is the author’s.

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Men in military uniforms robbed a magic store in Belgorod.

Yesterday afternoon, two men in camouflage who had allegedly returned from the war zone entered the store, Promagia, on People’s Boulevard. The shopkeepers claim that the two men introduced themselves as “Wagnerians.” Video footage of the incident shows that one of the men sported a Wagner PMC patch on his rucksack.

According to the shopkeepers, at first the military men tried to extort money: allegedly, the previous tenant was in debt to them. When the shopkeepers explained that they were new tenants, the men in uniform did not calm down and stole a pendant on a chain from the counter before snatching another item from a shopkeeper’s hands. When they were told they had to pay for the items, one of the “Wagnerians” replied that he had “given himself a gift.”

Police later arrived at the store to document the theft by the military men. The police told the shopkeepers that information about the same two soldiers had been reported by other shops.

Source: News Flash — Belgorod (Telegram), 9 July 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to News.ru for the tip. It is possible that this incident was cooked up and leaked into the media as part of the regime’s current smear campaign to discredit Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group. But given that they are ruthless fascist thugs themselves, it is just as possible that two “Wagnerians” did rob the magic store on People’s Boulevard in downtown Belgorod. Stranger things have happened.