Milena still can’t believe it. This Yakut woman from Eastern Siberia receives dozens of messages from her relatives: Entire villages are being raked by the police, who are taking in up to 100% of the men for the war in Ukraine.
Since the Kremlin’s order on Wednesday, September 21, 2022 to mobilize 300,000 additional soldiers, theoretically among the only reservists, each region has received a number of men made available to the army.
However, quotas in the country’s minority and indigenous peoples regions appear to be much higher than elsewhere. Imagine if they went so far as to fly a helicopter to look for reindeer herders! It’s very likely that up there in the tundra they don’t even know what’s happening in Ukraine,” says Milena.
Buryatia, Dagestan, Tatarstan…
On Saturday, September 24, women from Yakutsk, the regional capital, made a circle around a group of police officers to protest this mass mobilization. The action ended with arrests.
South of Lake Baikal, in Buryatia, the same scenes. The police took the Buryat men responsible for collecting pine nuts from the forests and the students from the universities. Many Buryats, enlisted in the army to escape misery, were deployed in Ukraine. Many died there.
In Dagestan, another non-ethnic Russian region in the Caucasus, all able-bodied men have disappeared from certain villages. In Crimea, according to the Ukrainian NGO Crimea SOS, 90% of army summonses go to the Tatars, a people who make up just 13% of the population.
chevron_left chevron_right