- Will Vernon
- BBC correspondent from Vorosovo, western Russia
August 22, 2022
image source,Archyde.com
Western officials say tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the war began.
Recruitment advertisements are playing from loudspeakers in the Russian town of Volosovo, near St. Petersburg, which, like many other towns in Russia, has loudspeakers mounted on high poles lining the main avenue.
Usually they’re used to broadcast patriotic music during National Day holidays, but now they’ve come in handy.
“We are forming two volunteer artillery battalions, inviting men aged 18-60 to join the army,” the loudspeaker broadcast.
This is also a message that is repeated throughout Russia. On social media, television and billboards, it urged Russian men to join the army and fight in Ukraine.
Faced with the huge losses caused by the war, the Russian authorities launched a campaign to call for enlistment in the army.
I stopped a man on Vorosovo Street and asked him if he supported the recruitment of volunteers.
“Yes! If I were young I would, but I’m too old,” he told me, clenching his fists. “We should bomb them!”
But most people in town seem less enthusiastic. One woman complained, “The war is too painful to even talk regarding.” When I asked her what she would say if one of her relatives wanted to join the army, she said, “Why go? Only their bodies will come back.”
Indeed, many bodies were returned.
image source,Archyde.com
Recruitment video urging young people to join the military.
While Russia has not given specific figures, Western officials say 70,000 to 80,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the invasion of Ukraine six months ago.
To lure new recruits, Russian authorities offered volunteers huge sums of money, land and even preferential school places for their children.
Recruiters even went to prison to recruit soldiers, promising them freedom and money.
Investigative journalist Roman Dobrokhotov said the conscription was a sign of desperation: “This is not the kind of soldiers you need to win a war. The Kremlin still wants to win in numbers. They (hope) It can send hundreds of thousands of desperate people who are in debt to the battlefield.”
Despite the possibility of offering recruits a staggering amount of cash — in some cases as much as $5,700 a month — Roman says the reality is quite different: “People don’t actually see the money. They[Soldiers)arenowreturning(fromUkraine)andtellingusjournalistshowtheyweredeceivedThisisaffectingthe(recruitment)situationthereisalackoftrustinourgovernmentsoIdon’tthinkthisstrategywillwork”
But some people are still happy to join the army.
Nina’s son Yevkini left their village in northern Karelia to join a volunteer camp. Nina said they gave her son, who had no military experience, a gun and sent him straight to Ukraine.
A few days later, he was killed. He was 24 at the time.
Nina tries to stop her son from going to war
Nina agreed to meet me in a park near Moscow. She found a part-time job in a Moscow bakery factory. She said the monotonous and repetitive work of packing bread made her forget regarding the loss of a child for a while. She remembers begging her son not to go to Ukraine.
“I tried to get him not to go. I cried; I said ‘there’s a war going on there, you’re going to be killed!’ And he said ‘Mom, it’s alright.'”
Nina was critical of the way the authorities recruited volunteers to fight in Ukraine.
Nina said, “They’re being sent away like idiots! They haven’t even had a gun before. They’re cannon fodder. Those generals thought, ‘We’ve got volunteers; great, let’s go!'”
Not everyone was as keen to sign up for the army as Yevkini was.
If you look around Russia, not all Russians fully support what the Kremlin calls “special military operations.”
Yevkini was killed just days following joining the army to fight in Ukraine.
The number of cars displaying the pro-war “Z” on Russian roads is still relatively small. The number of volunteers signing up for the military is also low, experts say.
Military analyst Pavel Luzin said people here were not prepared to sacrifice themselves for their president.
“The problem with the Kremlin is that most Russians don’t want to die for Putin or for the revival of the ‘great empire’. Recruitment is unlikely in the current state because there is no civil consensus in Russia on this war,” he said.
“In contrast to Ukraine, the Ukrainian people are ready to fight.”
Note: Thanks to Mediazona Media Alla Konstantinova for her help.