If you die, then with music, goes an old Russian soldier’s saying: mobilized in a recruiting center in southern Russia’s Bataisk
Image: Laif
Russia recruits civilians for the Ukraine war. The remote and impoverished regions are particularly hard hit. The well-armed law enforcement officers take brutal action against the unwilling, but then the soldiers are often sent to the front with insufficient supplies. A guest post.
An a cemetery near Moscow, my daughter Asja, who lives in Russia, reports that people in military uniforms were carrying someone to the grave. They snapped to attention and fired into the air on command. Not far away, a man wept over a child’s grave. Opposite him, a woman whispered something to an oval black-and-white photo on marble: “Dad, what happened, Daddy…” When the smoke from the shots cleared, Asja says, everything remained gray and silent.
In Moscow today, those who yesterday complained about the ban on Russian culture in the West are opening pop-up conscription offices in cultural institutions: for example in the Moscow City Museum, in the Darwin Museum, in the Roman Viktjuk Theater, in the Zil Cultural Center, in the Moscow cinema of youth and in various libraries. The men are thrown into the meat grinder of total “partial” mobilization. Seventy were recruited from Nogliki, a settlement of 11,000 people in the Far Eastern region of Sakhalin. My friend Masha says the farewell happened so quickly that she didn’t understand anything.