A journalist from Ulan-Ude, Yanina Nimaeva, recorded a video message to the head of the region, Anatoly Tsydenov. According to her, 4,000 people should be mobilized in Buryatia. The population of the republic, according to Rosstat, for 2022 is 982,629 people.
“We were given a verbal order to raise the mobilized from their beds, put them in cars and immediately bring them to the military registration and enlistment office. From there, everyone was sent to Ulan-Ude, ”an employee of one of the district administrations of Buryatia told People of Baikal.
All the mobilized were taken to the assembly point of the Military Commissariat of the Republic of Buryatia on Shumyatsky Street. As one of the local residents told The Insider, after registration they will be sent to Chita for a month-long exercise. They are told that they will then travel to territories where Russian "authorities" are organizing "referenda".
According to People of Baikal, training will also take place in the city of Borzya in the Trans-Baikal Territory. Sirena subscribers reported that people from different regions of Buryatia were being loaded onto planes. The third plane with mobilized people was caught on video in Ulan-Ude.
Another local resident told The Insider that a 58-year-old man, a captain in the reserve, who is not suitable for mobilization due to age or medical reasons, was almost taken away in the Zakamensky district. “He said that he had both prostatitis and hemorrhoids, showed medical documents. Two minutes later he left the office and said that he was still being taken. After that, he ran somewhere, ran back, showed certificates, and they told him: “Okay, then you still don’t go.” One gets the feeling that they are rowing everyone in order to fulfill the plan, they are taken to the city, and there is already a secondary inspection and those who are completely unsuitable are sent back, ”said the interlocutor.
According to another source of The Insider, the mobilization hit small villages especially tangibly. “Scrape through the villages. People write that they take a lot of men, regardless of the criteria. There are 400 people in our village, and 20 men were taken away. They planned more, but could not find it, because now it is the season of cedar cones and the men went into the forest. All men from 35 to 50 years old are now in the forest, and they didn’t even know that mobilization had happened,” a local resident said.
“In the media, chats and Viber, except for the account of the Free Buryatia Foundation and a couple of bloggers, no one writes how many were killed in the region. People know that in this village there are two or three, in that one there are two or three, but no one has a general picture. There is no such idea that our people have already suffered from the death of conscripts and contractors. What is happening now? I observe obedience. Well, what are we going to do? It's a machine and it will chew us up. They said it was necessary, then it was necessary, ”says another interlocutor of The Insider.
A local resident described to The Insider the situation at one of the mobilization points:
“Women from the district house of culture worked there. The young girls had wet eyes, and the woman was in her fifties, who said that it was hard, but there was a war going on, and our men needed to defend the country to save our state. The other girls just quietly said that it was their job and that it needed to be done. "Do you think it's easy for us to send our men?" they say and send. In the case of the older generation, this is propaganda and blind faith in a just cause, and among the younger generation, this is some kind of softness and humility. So they said, so it’s necessary, ”she explained.
With the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, Buryatia became one of the leaders among Russian regions in terms of the number of soldiers killed. Mortality among the military from Buryatia is over 60 people per 100,000 population of the region. This is almost 10 times higher than the average for Russia, and 468 times higher than in Moscow. Mediazona wrote about how, during the first months of the invasion, hundreds of soldiers from Buryatia refused to fight and how they were forced to return to the front.