Guillaume Dominguez, edited by Laura Laplaud
Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced a “partial mobilization” to continue his military operation in Ukraine. 300,000 Russians of fighting age are therefore called upon to join the ranks of the army. But this announcement is far from pleasing to those concerned who shouted their anger in 38 Russian cities on Wednesday.
Popular protest against Russia’s war in Ukraine has so far been measured in the country. But the partial mobilization announced Wednesday by Vladimir Putin has awakened fears among some Russians. 25 million of them are potentially mobilized to go to the front. Anger seems to be gaining ground, so much so that a few thousand people demonstrated on Wednesday in several major cities across the country.
38 cities affected by the protests
Spontaneous mobilizations gathered several thousand people in 38 cities in Russia, according to information reported by the NGO OVD-Info. Demonstrations with the only slogan: “no to war”. On an amateur video posted on social networks by a demonstrator, we see young Russians, arm in arm, marching through the streets of the capital. A protest movement that mobilized well beyond the country’s two major cities, Saint Petersburg and Moscow, according to NGO observers.
Demonstrations also took place in smaller cities such as Yekaterinburg in the Urals, Tomsk, or Novosibirsk in Siberia. Cities where until then few anti-war protests had taken place.
1,400 people arrested
The response to these spontaneous mobilizations was immediate from the police: nearly 1,400 people were arrested. Sometimes violent demonstrations. On Twitter, several videos show protesters being forcibly loaded into police vans. The Kremlin’s objective is to nip any idea of protest in the bud. At the same time, other videos released Thursday morning show men of all ages boarding buses to the sound of bugles. This would be, according to information from several Russian and Ukrainian journalists, the first recruitments of the 300,000 reservists announced by Vladimir Putin.