For all the polls that had shown two-thirds or three-quarter of Russians supporting this war, the events of the last week depict a different story. Russians were clearly happy to cheer for the invasion of Ukraine—or to tell a pollster as much—when they were told it would be easy and, more importantly, when nothing would be required of them. But when the war came to them, when they were asked to do the fighting themselves or to send their loved ones into the trenches, the veneer of patriotism vanished overnight.
Protests broke out not just in the usual places, like Moscow and St. Petersburg, but in far more docile and loyal regions. All week, all over the predominantly Muslim region of Dagestan, protesters, especially women, have been clashing with police and military recruiters. Many of them are mothers, facing down local bureaucrats, asking if they even understand why they are sending their sons to war. In largely Muslim Kabardino-Balkaria, mothers confronted officials and police. One woman flew into such a rage that she tore off her headscarf and screamed, “I’d like to see how you’d feel if your child were [fighting] there!” In Yakutia, mothers surrounded police officers and danced around them like a sinister maypole, chanting, “Let our children live!” …
Putin had wanted to draft 300,000 men, but, according to the F.S.B., more than 260,000 Russian men had fled Russia by Sunday night, just four days after the announcement of “partial mobilization.” According to the governments of Finland, Kazakhstan, and Georgia alone, some 200,000 Russian citizens have crossed into their countries. That doesn’t include the tens of thousands of others that have fled to places like Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Israel.
It is obvious now why Putin had avoided doing this for so long.
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