After President Vladimir Putin announced this week that Russia was conscripting some 300,000 reservists and military veterans to reinforce its war effort in Ukraine, international flights out of Russian cities quickly sold out. This latest wave of Russia’s exodus included Anton Shalaev, a 38-year-old senior manager at an IT company, and 15 colleagues.
On less than a day’s notice, these men of military age all left their relatively comfortable lives in downtown Moscow to fly to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. Because of Putin’s war, Shalaev tossed a book, an iPad, and a laptop in a backpack and got out of Dodge.
Shalaev and his co-workers are true tech geeks, producers of high-value computer games. They represent their country’s brightest and best, members of a tech elite that was the economic foundation of Russia’s new middle class. In a last selfie from Moscow, Shalaev brandished a coffee mug that bore the slogan Not today, Satan.
Anton Shalaev: On the day Putin declared the war, I knew I would never fight on behalf of this new Nazi Reich. They are my personal enemies: mercenaries who steal my country from me, occupy foreign territories, and kill innocent people. Putin’s army commanders have had plenty of time to turn down their contracts; instead, they are recruiting more cannon fodder now.
So I chose to help Ukrainians suffering from this horror—pay for shelters in Kyiv with cryptocurrency and write antiwar posts on social media. To encourage Russians at home, I said: “Guys, look, I am writing this from Moscow.”
The departure was super stressful. The border guards took each of my friends aside into a small room, interrogated them, asked if they had ever served in the military, and if not, why not. And you know that type of sly border official making their little jokes: “Aha, you are leaving on the day of conscription.” Of course, they checked whether our names were in the database for the mobilization.
Shalaev: A few old men and an army of zombies are leading us to hell. I say that because people around me in Russia behaved as if they had been bitten by a zombie, dragging my entire country into a dreadful war. All I saw was Russian loser husbands beating their wives, while the entire rotting house of the state system has turned my people into an army of the dead. They are my enemies. . . . . This entire war is a crime against humanity.
On February 24, when the invasion of Ukraine began, it became clear to me that the old man had nothing to lose. He [Putin] is a psychopath and does not care what happens to us all, to our economy, to our future.
My only hope is that he has some instinct for self-protection that will stop him from nuking us all.
The CNN piece is of a similar tone and looks at those fleeing by car, bus, train or in some cases walking the last few miles to escape the hell Putin is creating and that they had no hand in creating. Here are excerpts:
Tension was in the air as a long trail of cars lined up near the Petkuhovo checkpoint on the border between Russia and Kazakhstan late Friday night.
Andrei Alekseev, a 27-year-old engineer from the city of Yekaterinburg, was among many men in the queue who were fleeing Russia in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s mobilization orders. Cars had to go through Russian and Kazakh border checks, both of which lasted about two hours.
Alekseev woke up to the news of Putin’s mobilization order on Wednesday morning and he knew he had to flee Russia. He met up with his friends that night to discuss their next steps and decided to avoid taking any risks and to leave Russia with no plan in mind.
On Saturday, Putin signed the law on military service, setting a jail term of up to 10 years for evading military duty due to mobilization, and up to 15 years in prison for wartime desertion.
The decree signed by Putin appears to allow for wider mobilization than he suggested in the speech that aired on Wednesday. According to the address, 300,000 reservists would be drafted to the front, breaking his promises earlier in the war that there would be no mobilization. However, the decree itself puts no cap on how many people can be mobilized.
“Mobilization is called ‘partial,’ but no parameters of this partiality, neither geographical, nor in terms of criteria, are specified,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist, wrote on her social media page. “According to this text, anyone can be drafted, except for workers of the military-industrial complex.”
Kirill Ponomarev, 23, who also fled Russia via a Kazakhstan border, said he struggled to book a ticket. The night before Putin’s address he was looking up tickets out of Russia.
While all men aged below 60 in Russia now share the fear of getting drafted, Putin’s mobilization disproportionately affects poorer, more ethnically diverse regions of Russia, according to Alexandra Garmazhapova, president of the Free Buryatia Foundation, who spoke to CNN. “In Buryatia, mobilization is not partial, everyone is mobilized. Summons come to students, pensioners, fathers of many children, people with disabilities,” she told CNN.
Some men were lucky to find out the news of mobilization orders from abroad. Ilya, 35, was on vacation with his family in Turkey when he received a text from his co-workers in Kurgan, a city in the Urals region of Russia, that his office had received a draft letter for him.
His wife and child returned to Russia while he stayed behind in Turkey. “I don’t want war, I don’t want to die for someone else’s ambitions, I don’t want to prove anything to anyone, it was a difficult decision to not return to Russia, very difficult, I don’t know when I can now see my family, my loved ones,” Ilya told CNN.
Note how one young Rusian called Putin a psychopath - no wonder he and Trump hit it off as Putin used Trump as a Russian asset.
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