On September 21, Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” in Russia. Alexei Navalny was in court that day where his claims against the penal colony where he is now serving his sentence were being considered. During the court session, Navalny learned the details of the mobilization from his lawyers and journalists. We publish his statement on this subject in full.
I don’t understand one thing. The army has a million people, the Federal Guard Service has 350,000, the Interior Ministry has another 1.5 to 2 million people, and there are so many people in the Federal Penitentiary Service. Why would they draft civilians?
So there will be five million draft dodgers running around the country. And there will be a million cops chasing them, trying to mobilize them somewhere.
Does this mean that conscripting convicts didn’t help the situation? What percentage of convicts are serving time under Article 228 [drug possession]? They’re going to make some “fine” soldiers. You could pay them in heroin.
Right now some 30-year-old workers from Kovrov will be drafted to get killed somewhere near Kherson. All this is horrible. I don’t think they’ll draft people from Moscow. If you draft 50 thousand people from Moscow today, 150 thousand of their relatives will be protesting in the streets tomorrow.
The main thing is that the criminal war of aggression that is going on keeps getting worse. And Putin is trying to involve as many people as possible in all this, he wants to smear blood on hundreds of thousands of people. Of course, this will lead to a huge tragedy, a huge number of deaths, and it certainly will not lead to anything good.
The size of this crime and the number of people involved is growing, and it is being done solely for this one man to hold on to his personal power. In order to prolong his personal rule, Putin is tormenting the neighboring country, killing people there, and now he is throwing a huge number of Russian citizens into the meat grinder that is this war, people who are supposed to just live normally and take care of their families. So, this certainly had already been a crime before, but now it has become a crime of a much larger magnitude.