Russian President Vladimir Putin had just finished announcing a partial mobilization of military reserves on Wednesday when Anastasia Burakova’s phone started lighting up with calls and texts. Ms Burakova runs a Georgia-based charity called Ark, which provides a range of services to Russians trying to leave the country. Within hours of Mr Putin’s announcement, he had received 3,000 calls for help and expects many more this week. “I can compare the panic to the panic that was at the beginning of the war,” she said in an interview. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday that Russia initially planned to call up 300,000 reservists with prior combat experience. However, a decree published on the Kremlin’s official website placed no limit on the number of men who could be recruited to fight, and Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian media outlet operating in exile, quoted a source in the presidential administration as saying that the actual target mobilization was one million new soldiers. While Mr Putin said students “can continue to go to class”, it is not clear how Russia can maintain this exemption or who else will not be forced to serve. (Women are exempt from conscription in Russia.) Fear and uncertainty has Russians scrambling to find a way out of the country. “Of course, everyone is afraid,” said Egor Kuroptev, director of the Free Russia Foundation in the South Caucasus, which is also based in Georgia. “No one wants to go and die there.” Mr. Kuroptev’s organization has received hundreds of calls from Russians since the mobilization was announced. While his team usually deals with political dissidents and journalists, it now takes requests from ordinary people who are desperate to leave. “They’re scared, they don’t have money, they don’t know how to leave or where to go,” he said. “They have no idea what they will do if they leave. That’s another story. You can find money for a bus, but where will you live?’ However, leaving Russia is becoming more difficult. Flights to the few destinations still open to Russian travelers – such as Turkey, Armenia and Dubai – have been grounded and prices for whatever remains have skyrocketed. On the Turkish Airlines website on Thursday, there were no tickets available from Moscow to Istanbul until Tuesday. A business class seat was priced at US$4,000. On the website of the Russian Aeroflot, tickets to Turkey and Armenia for the next five days are sold out. The first available flight to Dubai was on 30 September. The cost of a one-way flight from Moscow to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, jumped from $269 to $2,060 within an hour of Mr. Putin’s speech, Mr. Kuroptev said. It is still possible to buy bus tickets and cross Russia’s border with Georgia and some other countries, he said, but the waiting time is much longer than usual. Another concern is that Russia may ban adult men from leaving the country or even their local communities. In Tatarstan, the local government published an order according to which “officers, warrant officers, brokers, sergeants, foremen, soldiers and sailors of the reserve” were temporarily prohibited from leaving their cities of residence. There have been reports that military officials in at least three other Russian regions have issued similar orders. “What I advise people for now is to leave as fast as you can, as soon as possible, and get your family to leave even if they think they can do it later,” said Varvara Magomedova, who works with Russian refugees in Poland. “The only thing I care about now is getting as many children out of Russia as I can.” Ms Magomedova said one option was to head to Belarus, which does not require a visa, and then try to move to another country. It’s also “a bit easier to hide in Belarus than in Russia,” he added. Even if people can make it out of Russia, it is difficult to find a place to settle. Several European countries, including the Baltic states, have said that tax evasion would not be sufficient grounds for claiming refugee status. Ms Magomedova and other groups have called on countries to issue humanitarian visas to Russians, but this too has not been widely accepted. The first videos have emerged from Russia of men mobilizing for war and suggest that mobilization is moving faster in places like Buyatia, in the Far East, and Chechnya, in the south – areas mostly inhabited by ethnic minorities. In the town of Neryungri, women held children in their arms and wiped away tears as men carrying backpacks silently climbed into a trio of buses outside the local sports stadium. Similar footage was posted by towns and cities across the vast country. Other videos posted on social media show long lines of cars at crossings to Georgia and Mongolia, two of the few countries whose borders with Russia remain open. Small anti-conscription protests in more than 20 cities across Russia were quickly quelled by riot police on Wednesday night. OVD-Info, an NGO that monitors political repression in Russia, said 1,312 people were arrested in the protests. On Thursday, OVD-Info said it had received reports that at least 15 prisoners in Moscow and one in Voronezh had received notices while behind bars. Vesna, the youth group that organized Wednesday’s protests, called on Russians to take to the streets again on Saturday. In a post on Telegram, the group argued that the words “mobilization” and “graves” sound alike in Russian. “The whole country is our ally! No graves! Life for our children! Putin – resign!” Even the Russians who decided to stay are worried, hoping they don’t qualify for conscription. “It’s absolutely crazy! Families are being torn apart,” said one 41-year-old man, whom The Globe and Mail did not identify because he could face consequences for speaking out about the mobilization process. “There are cases when Russians get a divorce because the wife supports [the war] but the husband does not.’ On Thursday, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of the country’s Security Council, made it clear that Russia intends to annex the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia following a series of referendums scheduled for September. 23 to 27. After that, he said, Russia would be willing to use “any Russian weapons, including strategic nuclear weapons,” to defend its new territory. “The Western establishment and, in general, all citizens of NATO countries must understand that Russia has chosen its own path,” Mr. Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel. “There is no way back.”
