So too many Russian lawyers are helping eligible men avoid mobilisation? Well, then send them to Ukraine to fight.
17 October 2022 – As I reported last week, police and military officers have repeatedly swooped down on Moscow business centers, unannounced. They are looking for men to fight in Ukraine — and they have seized nearly every one they saw. Even some musicians, rehearsing. They have come into dozens of office complexes, rounding up scores and pushing them into vans to be taken to the nearest military enlistment office, part of a harsh new phase in the Russian drive.
Not only Moscow. This has been happening in dozens of cities and towns across Russia, grabbing men of fighting age before they can go into hiding to avoid the officials who are seizing them and sending them to fight in Ukraine. Several verified Telegram accounts my Ukraine war team follow have detailed how police and military press-gangs have simply snatched men off the streets and outside Metro stations. They’ve lurked in apartment building lobbies to hand out military summonses. They’ve raided office blocks and hostels. They’ve invaded cafes and restaurants, blocking the exits.
One Telegram account recited how, in a predawn sweep on the Mipstroy construction company dormitories just outside Moscow, more than 200 men were rounded up. Also, dozens have been rounded up from Moscow homeless shelters.
NOTE TO MY READERS: numbers are hard to verify, but my OSINT sources (who have pooled information from neighboring countries) believe more than 700,000 Russian men and their families have fled Russia since mobilization. Russian authorities have now set up mobilization points at border crossings to prevent further departures. But the exodus continues through unmonitored routes as more and more want to leave after seeing the aggressive police raids and fresh reports of the newly conscripted men being slaughtered in the war.
Up until now, swamped by panic-stricken requests for help to avoid being drafted, Russian lawyers have reported working flat out to offer advice to those at risk of being sent to fight in Ukraine – and have also been overwhelmed by demands for support from Putin’s government after it was announced on 21 September that 300,000 people would be mobilised to boost Russia’s flagging war effort.
NOTE TO MY READERS: in reality, the number is closer to 1,000,000.
Lawyers, as well as scores of Russian and non-Russian social media sites, have issued “tip sheets” on how to avoid being mobilised, circulating alongside forms for claiming medical exemptions or becoming a conscientious objector and instructions for filling them out. Stories have spread like wildfire of men who should be exempt under the stated criteria but have been called up anyway. Scores of others have determined that the best thing to do is hide. Two Telegram accounts devoted to this have each said messages have more than tripled to 500,000+ in the past two weeks.
But for lawyers, it took a turn for the worse last week.
A Ukrainian lawyer based in Kyiv, who I have known for a very long because of my pre-war work in Ukraine (and who shall remain nameless), emailed me over the weekend. He has long been in contact with scores of Russian lawyers through the years, and been in daily contact with many of them since the war began. He told me the Russian government was fed up with lawyers helping eligible men to avoid the mobilization effort.
So, a solution: many Russian lawyers (and other white collar professionals) are being mobilized to the army and many have already been sent to Ukraine. This even included Russian lawyers at American and European international law firms (or ex-Russian offices). As these firms still maintain some relations and communication with their ex-colleagues, this recruitment has been easy to track.
And so, to protect their colleagues/former colleagues they have been providing them information as to how to surrender to the Ukrainian Army. As he noted in his email:
“Doing so will help to save the lives of these lawyers, as the chance for them to be killed is high (way above 50%). And this is due to how little training they are receiving, and how Russians treat their own wounded soldiers in a miserable way”.
This comports with a stream of independent, verified OSINT we have received. The loss of Russian forces due to abysmal sanitary and medical conditions has been astonishingly high. Soldiers have died of relatively minor wounds, infections, illnesses, and frostbite. They are lucky to be taken prisoner in Ukraine which has fed, warmed, and given the necessary medical care to Russian prisoners.
But note: not every time. I have scores of reports of Ukrainian soldiers executing Russian captives after they have liberated occupied territory and discovered Russian atrocities. The stories mirror those of American soldiers who many times summarily executed German soldiers they captured when they liberated the death camps during World War II. More on that in a subsequent post.
My Ukrainian lawyer friend sent me the information sheet being sent to both Russian lawyers, and any conscripts already in Ukraine. Obviously it was in Russian but my team translated it. It is quite detailed. Here are just a few parts:
How to surrender if you are alone:
-Unholster the magazine and hang the weapon on your left shoulder with the barrel down
-Raise and show your empty hands
-Hold up the white cloth.
-Shout loudly, “Surrender!”
-Approach on command.
-Comply with the demands of the Ukrainians
How to surrender to a group or an entire unit:
-Stack all weapons in front of you at a distant distance.
-Stand directly in front of the military equipment. Silence it; it should not be in a fighting position.
-Choose a negotiator to notify the Ukrainian military of your desire to surrender. This should be an officer or the most senior in rank. With a white flag and no weapons.
-What guarantees are given to prisoners of war:
For all Russian soldiers who want to surrender, there is a 24-hour hotline set up by the Ukraine military command. Russian military themselves, as well as their relatives, can contact it to find out more about the procedure for surrendering to captivity. They will also assist in getting the message out via various social media distribution channels.
POSTSCRIPT
ABOVE: Former prisoners from the Rostov-on-Don Prison, Russia. Every man in this picture is dead.
Many of you are not subscribed to my regular Ukraine War reports, or follow me on Linkedin, so here is an interesting story I posted last week coming through the Russian Telegram channel ‘Cheka-OGPU’ which has been highly accurate during the Ukraine war. The following is based on a rough translation of a long thread, courtesy of my local team.
The Telegram account had posted a long, detailed account of the recruitment by the Wagner Group of 200 prisoners from the Rostov region and their subsequent massacre by the Ukrainians in their first combat engagement. Their sources detailed the recruitment of prisoners for PMCs [Private Military Companies] in a high-security colony in one of the border regions. The recruiter said something like “we are recruiting people to kill: murderers, brigands, we need you, we need everyone”.
The ex-prisoners took a familiar route: they received equipment and went to a training camp but had little training. A squad of the “most hardy recruits” (31 of them) was assembled from the masses and the group was sent off to carry out their first mission.
In the end, the baptism of fire ended in the death of 28 men, while the 3 survivors were taken to hospital. The squad leader was hit in the head by shrapnel and miraculously survived.
Representatives of the PMC told the squad leader to get better and prepare for a “second assault.”
Of all those convicts who initially expressed a desire to fight, and stayed in the recruitment colony as “reservists”, and heard what happened to the 31 – all refused to go to the war zone and were returned to prison.
I have a very long post-in-progress on Russian military recruitment for Ukraine so more to come.