38 cities, nearly 1,400 arrests… Partial mobilization sparks protests in Russia

The announcement, during a speech by Vladimir Putin, of the mobilization of the country’s 300,000 reservists caught the Russians cold on Wednesday. In the hours that followed, rallies formed in 38 cities across the country to challenge the presidential order. The police raids led to the arrest of nearly 1,400 people. Between vituperations against “the West”, nuclear blackmail, victimization and intensification of the Russian war effort, the message sent Wednesday by Vladimir Putin on Russian television on Wednesday froze the world. But clearly, the international community is not the only ones in shock. Indeed, the will expressed by the President of the Russian Federation in his speech to sign an order of “partial mobilization”, that is to say to call up the country’s 300,000 reservists to send them to the front, triggered a wave of protests among the Russian people. From Moscow to Arkkangelsk, Russia in the streets In 38 cities, citizens worried or furious about the course of the war and its new turn, gathered to express their opposition the turn of the screw recommended by Vladimir Putin. Outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the nation’s political nerve centers, there have been protest rallies in Yekaterinburg, in the foothills of the Urals, or in Siberia’s Tomsk and Novosibirsk.OVD-Info, an NGO whose work consists in particular in monitoring the demonstrations, still spotted processions in Perm, Chelyabinsk, Ufa, Krasnoyarsk, Voronezh, Tver, Krasnodar, Saratov, Kaliningrad, Irkutsk, Petrozavodsk, Ryazan, Arkhangelsk, Tula, Yakutsk, Korolev, Ulan- Oude, Zheleznogorsk, Izhevsk, Samara, Salavat, Volgograd, Vologda, Tyumen, Kazan, Ivanovo, Syktyvkar, Surgut, Nizhny Novgorod, Kaluga, Vyatskiye Polyany, Smolensk, Belgorod. Difficult to get an idea of ​​the number of demonstrators in the very autocratic and opaque Russian Federation. We just know, thanks to OVD-Info again, that the police arrested at least 1,386 people on the sidelines of these outbursts of anger, according to a count stopped at 7:30 a.m. this Thursday. Statistics which show that these are the demonstrations hostile to the war and to the policy of the Kremlin the most significant since those which had succeeded the entry into the war of the country against Ukraine. It was in Saint Petersburg and Moscow that the highest number of arrests were recorded on Wednesday with 541 and 509 detentions respectively. Like these women who agreed to appear in front of BFMTV cameras in Moscow. “We should have been afraid before, the worst is happening,” laments a first young woman. their immediate fate, but fear for the life of a husband, brother or son. Like this second Muscovite questioned: “I will not give them the life of my child. It will be useless but it is my duty to express my opinion: no, to war.” In total, OVD – Info has identified 16,500 arrests among opponents of the war since the invasion on February 24. A massive exodus In addition to rallies, there are many ways to refuse a possible mobilization. Among them, a process appears to be more discreet and undoubtedly more effective, although also more definitive: flying away and leaving the country. The airlines have thus noted an imminent saturation of planes departing from Russian tarmacs. The spokesperson for the Liligo flight comparator site thus underlined to BFMTV.com “an increasing trend” during the day on Wednesday. “Between Tuesday and today, searches for plane tickets from Russia were multiplied by 2.5”, he notes. Several routes were quick to fall victim to this success. “Flights from Moscow to the capitals of Georgia, Turkey and Armenia for September 21 were no longer available within minutes of Putin’s announcement,” The Moscow Times reported after consulting the page of aviasales.ru (largest local travel planning platform) continuing: “As of noon Moscow time, direct flights from Moscow to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan had also ceased to appear on the website.” A one-way trip on a Moscow-Istanbul this Thursday was also flashed at 1,250 euros according to our antenna. Summoning 300,000 reservists is one thing, but remobilizing the spirits promises to be another pair of sleeves for the Russian power .