Latvia — In just two days since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced mobilization to help his ailing war in Ukraine, thousands of men have been chased down by recruiters, in some cases rounded up in the middle of the night, and swiftly loaded onto buses and planes to be sent off for military training and, presumably, deployment to the front lines. 

And despite assurances by the authorities of a “partial” mobilization, limited to reservists with prior military experience, the initial haphazard call-up process has sparked fears that Putin is trying to activate far more soldiers than the 300,000 initially stated by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

“It’s just hell here; they are grabbing everyone,” a resident of Sosnovo-Ozerskoye, a rural settlement of about 6,000 people in the eastern Siberian region of Buryatia, wrote to Victoria Maldeva, an activist with the Free Buryatia Foundation who has collected hundreds of reports about mass mobilization.

“Drunk men who are supposed to leave the very same day are roaming the town square,” the Sosnovo-Ozerskoye resident wrote. “Everyone knows each other here. This is impossible to bear. Women are crying, chasing the bus, and men pleaded for forgiveness before they left as they know they are facing certain death.”

The Free Buryatia Foundation and similar activists working in Yakutia, another remote, impoverished region of Russia, said they were concerned that the mobilization is disproportionately targeting ethnic minorities that live in these areas, many thousands of miles from Moscow.