by Fabrizio Dragosei
Putin grants Snowden citizenship. Shock for massacre of neo-Nazis at school: 15 dead
Perhaps it is no coincidence that just as the call to arms by hundreds of thousands of Russians is proving more problematic than expected, hypotheses about renewed peace negotiations are resurfaced. Hypotheses clashing with the next and now almost certain annexation of part of Ukraine to Russia. And this operation leads Kyiv to argue that at this point no more negotiating table will be possible.
The recruitment of reserve men proceeds in enforced stages, but always encounters new difficulties, with protests in all republics of the Federation and violent actions: a young man who broke into a recruitment center in Siberia and shot dead an officer; another who set himself on fire in protest of the call to the front in European Russia.
As if the situation were very different, Vladimir Putin met his Belarusian counterpart and colleague Aleksandr Lukashenko in Sochi on the Black Sea to say that he is ready to cooperate with the West if he treats us with respect. And what confirms a strange desire for dialogue are the words of Turkish Foreign Minister Cavusoglu, reporting on last week’s meeting between Putin and Erdogan in Uzbekistan. The Kremlin chief said he was ready to resume negotiations but had new terms.
A hypothesis that stubbornly circulates that in reality Moscow wants to take some time (perhaps to urge the Ukrainians to stop their offensive) to set up new operational regiments with today’s recruits.
But in the regions where the military seems to be attracting more (the more peripheral ones), there are several problems. Dagestan, for example, riddled with violent protests by women (which cannot be recalled): they took to the streets in the capital Makhachkal and in the city of Khasavyurt: Why do we have to send our children to war? It wasn’t the Ukrainians who came to Russia, it was us who attacked them! A post appeared on the website of the Defender of the Rights of Citizens of the Caucasian Republic, which was later deleted: A genocide of young Dagestanians is underway. From the very beginning, it is ours who, together with the Chechens, are called more than others.
Ust-Ilimsk is a city in Irkutsk Oblast in Siberia north of Lake Baikal. 25-year-old Ruslan Zinin entered the military office and said: nobody will fight; now we’re all going home. He then drew a rifle and shot the senior recruiting officer, seriously injuring him. In Ryazan, two hundred kilometers south of Moscow, another boy doused himself with petrol and set himself on fire. Immediate rescue, was taken to the hospital where not in serious condition. A story not directly linked to the war, but perhaps to the climate of great tension, the attack on a school in Izhevsk (the homeland of Kalashnikov) by a young neo-Nazi, killing 15 people, including 11 children, and then committing suicide .
Since the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, there have been 54 arson attacks in military centers. There have been 17 fires since last Wednesday, when recruitment began. According to an opposition site, 261,000 people left Russia in five days (yesterday alone there were 5,000 cars at the border with Georgia). File also to Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Finland which is not closed yet.
It doesn’t look like Edward Snowden, whom the US considers a traitor and who was granted citizenship by Putin yesterday, will be called to arms. He never served in the Russian army, his lawyer said, explaining that he couldn’t be among the 300,000 reservists. However, his experience as a computer scientist and analyst would be very useful to the Army. Unless he already got it in those years of exile in the Great Land.
September 26, 2022 (Change September 26, 2022 | 22:47)
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