Alexander Rybin
The announcement by the President Putin of partial mobilization in our country on September 21 is a repeat of February 24 from earlier this year. We are no longer talking about the salvation of the Russian people and the preservation of Russia. But the decision on partial mobilization is another attempt by the Putin regime to save itself.
I very much doubt that the mobilization will affect only 300,000 Russian citizens, as announced by Putin's Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. He was probably referring to the number of those who will be involved in the first stage of mobilization. It must be understood that the more experienced, more motivated, and better trained army is the one now fighting on behalf of Ukraine rather than the Russian one. Sending 300,000 people to the front and to the front-line areas will merely represent a sharp increase in losses on the Russian side.
Let me remind you that the rearmament and reform of the army, which Putin's propagandists (all those Simonyans, Solovyovs and Kiselevs, who, in my opinion, should be sent to the front first) blared from every outlet for the last 15 years, failed. The equipment is Soviet-era, the command and control system is significantly inferior to the command and control system of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and NATO armies, there is no modern communication, etc. What will happen to the newly mobilized Russian citizens at the front? Just watch the numerous videos of burned Russian columns in the last days of February.
If Russians were really important to Putin, then the Russian army would have entered the territory of Ukraine in the spring of 2014, when nationalist militias, with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, suppressed peaceful popular protests in the eastern part of the country. Then the Armed Forces of Ukraine were in the same condition as the Russian army is now. The Russian army was much more highly motivated than it is now; and her moral case was much more obvious than it is now. The regional administrations of Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk were seized by local, pro-Russian residents, and numerous pro-Russian rallies (against the new Kyiv nationalist-oligarchic authorities) took place in other cities in the south and east of Ukraine. But that was over eight years ago, and since then the situation in both states has changed.
The Putin regime is beset by a terrible zugzwang: whatever the regime does, it only drives itself further into a corner. The main problem is that each new move of the regime leads to still greater bloody casualties among the citizens of Russia and Ukraine.
And yes, the announcement of partial mobilization will inevitably lead to a new round of repressions. There will be new "foreign agents," new "traitors," and new "deserters." There will be a strengthening of the dictatorship. There will be cops and KGB agents who, fearful of being sent to the front, will start hunting for citizens who criticize the criminal regime even in the slightest.
At the end of last year, I wrote a column for "Rabkor" called "The Year of the Lost Revolution." Now we are seeing the worst version of what happens to society when the revolution does not happen on time.
Here is one final detail, one of history's ironies. On September 21, 1993, President Boris Yeltsin signed Decree No. 1400, which called for the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet, which, in his words, was making "increasing efforts to usurp not only the executive, but even the judicial functions." An hour after the decree was announced, the speaker of the Russian parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, called it a coup d'état. That coup d'etat was an important stage in the formation of the current Putin regime.