It gotten to this in Russia….
Cops and military types grabbing men off Moscow streets , hotels, office buildings…..
To ‘draft’….
Russian men are still finding ways to hide or leave the country…
The Russian military is trying to hold ground while the Ukraine military slowly advances….
“I have no idea why they took him,” said Alexei, who, like dozens of others in the office complex, was rounded up and taken to the nearest military enlistment office, part of a harsh new phase in the Russian drive.
In cities and towns across Russia, men of fighting age are going into hiding to avoid the officials who are seizing them and sending them to fight in Ukraine.
Police and military press-gangs in recent days have 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.
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The press-gangs appear to descend at random. It is terrifying — and, at times, comically haphazard. Alexei, a 30-something pacifist, lives with his cat and, until Russia’s he was hauled off, enjoyed hanging out with friends in bars, cafes and parks, going to concerts and planning his next holiday in Europe. (He and others in this report spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld out of concern for his safety. The Washington Post has confirmed the raid, but could not independently verify the details he provided.)…
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More than 300,000 Russian men and their families have fled Russia since mobilization, reports from neighboring countries indicate. Authorities have set up mobilization points at border crossings to prevent departures. Many others want to leave after seeing the aggressive police raids and the first reports of the newly conscripted men dying in the war….
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Antiwar sentiment could harden as the bodies of soldiers who were deployed just weeks earlier begin returning home for burial….
Key developments
- “Many soldiers were killed and wounded,” the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said of the military base attack, calling it a “terrible event” and “terrorist act” on Sunday morning. No civilians were killed, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. The shooting took place Saturday morning at a military facility in the Valuysky district, about nine miles from the Ukrainian border. Russia’s Investigative Committee opened a criminal probe into the attack.
- Iran’s Foreign Ministry denied that it was sending weapon shipments to Russia. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that Moscow had used Iranian-supplied drones to attack regions in recent days, and shipments could allow the Russian military to continue targeting Ukraine’s cities and offset a supply of military equipment that U.K. defense officials say has degraded significantly.
- The Ukrainian Defense Ministry is offering a $100,000 reward for the capture of Igor Girkin, a former defense leader for Russian-backed forces in Ukraine’s east. Girkin, who uses the alias Strelkov, shared a photo on Telegram on Saturday of him wearing his military uniform with his wife. “To the questions: Where is Igor Ivanovich?” he wrote. “Will be in touch soon.”
- Elon Musk appears to have backpedaled on threats to cut funding to Starlink, the satellite internet service that for months has been providing vital communications for Ukraine’s military. The billionaire’s suggestion Friday that his company, SpaceX, may stop paying for the emergency network was met with a chorus of condemnation including from Ukrainian diplomats. Behind the scenes, the company has been in talks with the Pentagon about the program’s future financing.
Battleground updates
- About 9,000 Russian soldiers will soon arrive in Belarus as part of a joint military deployment between the two nations, the Russian ally says. A Minsk defense official announced that the first servicemen had arrived, with the rest to follow by train in the next few days, Interfax reported.
- Russia’s effort to limit Ukrainian counteroffensives by pounding cities with missiles and mobilizing more troops probably will not shift the dynamics of the conflict, which is tilting in Ukraine’s favor, Western intelligence assessments and military experts said. Such attacks included strikes this weekend on the southern city of Nikopol, across the Dnieper River from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. At least eight people were hurt in the shelling, which destroyed nearly 30 buildings, cars, gas pipelines and other pieces of infrastructure, said Valentyn Reznichenko, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, and Yevhen Yevtushenko, head of the Nikopol district military administration.
- Zelensky said the Russian death toll is “approaching 65,000.” In his nightly address Saturday, he suggested that the way things are going, “even 100,000 dead Russian citizens will not prompt the Kremlin to think a little bit.” The Post couldn’t immediately verify his claims. The Kremlin last month put the Russian fatality count at 5,937, but Western estimates are much higher. In July, CIA Director William J. Burns estimated that 15,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and some 45,000 wounded.
- Moscow is now focusing its military efforts on advancing to the administrative border of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, as well as holding captured districts of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Kherson, according to Ukraine’s armed forces. “The enemy is shelling the positions of our troops along the entire contact line,” it said in a Facebook post.
- Russian-backed separatists accused Ukrainian forces of shelling the office of the Donetsk mayoron Sunday, and photographs showed the building partly destroyed. In a Telegram post, the city’s pro-Kremlin administrators blamed Ukrainian missiles for the attack, adding that no casualties have been reported so far….