‘Arming millions if need be’

Who stands behind Russia’s new conscription system and the crackdown on draft dodgers?

The State Duma’s hasty vote on a package of amendments to Russia’s conscription law has ushered in an entirely new system of military recruitment. An older draft of this legislation had been in the hopper since 2018. Four years after the initial submission, it was passed in the second reading, practically on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and then languished without being revisited for another year. In late March this year, the deputies decided to revert the bill to the second reading. Then, hours before the vote on April 11, a massive amendment package was posted on the Duma website, signaling that the vote now concerned a far more radical approach to military conscriptions. The draft law was passed unanimously by all but one deputy. The one legislator who abstained from the vote later said that he’d “pressed the wrong button.”

The improvements enumerated in the new package include sending draft summonses electronically, via the state bureaucracy website Gosuslugi and its messaging service. Those who don’t want to fight will no longer be able to leave the country. Inside Russia, penalties, restrictions, and curtailed rights await those who ignore draft notices.

The deputies spent all of 23 minutes on the second and third readings of a bill that amounts to an overhaul of the state’s approach to military recruitment. (For comparison, the new vaping legislation took them twice as long to deliberate.) The metadata of the text file containing the amendments shows it had been created on April 8, and last edited on April 11, the morning before the vote. In conversation with Meduza, one of the legislators admitted that the majority of deputies who would all vote in favor of the amendments didn’t know their contents right up until the time of the vote. “It was just like snow in April. You didn’t even know what to tell the people about it. But there will be questions,” he mused.

The communist KPRF fraction of the Duma tried to delay the vote, citing parliamentary protocol that requires draft legislation to be published three days prior to the vote. In response to these scruples, the Security Committee Chair Andrey Kartapolov insisted that the need for amendments was too urgent to postpone the vote, and that they were necessary in light of the “serious problems in military record-keeping” uncovered during last year’s mobilization. (In the fall of 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians opted to leave the country rather than go to war.)

Two Kremlin insiders who spoke with Meduza said Vladimir Putin’s executive office did not take part in drafting the new conscription law and wasn’t so much as informed about its contents. The change, they believe, was initiated by the Defense Ministry.

The fact that the president’s administration had been in the dark about the proposed amendments means that its propaganda machine wasn’t prepared for them, either, and failed, in turn, to prepare the public for the abrupt closure of all the time-honored conscription loopholes. According to Meduza’s informed sources, the pro-Kremlin media only got their guidelines for covering the conscription reform in the afternoon on April 11. Like the amendments themselves, these guidelines had been drafted by the Defense Ministry. The document, written in stilted apparatchik-speak, explains the need for updating the law as “Russia’s swift response to the flaws of military record-keeping detected in 2022.”

“The new system is people-oriented and convenient,” says the propaganda manual; “it reduces direct contacts with the draft offices and the chances of error.” Electronic summonses are deemed necessary because “people don’t always live at their registered address.” Curtailing the rights of draft dodgers is explained in terms of “accountability for evasion of service,” which “ensures fairness and equality among the citizens.”

Those who deliberately dodge mandatory term service in the military, shunning their constitutional duty, must be very clear that they will be held accountable. Otherwise, a lack of accountability would signal that unlawful acts can be repeated, which would lead to social tensions.

A person who dodges the draft cannot enjoy greater privileges than the person who fulfills his constitutional and civic duty.

A Duma deputy who spoke to Meduza on the condition of anonymity doubts that propaganda can smooth over the shock over the new conscription law. He says the amendments “definitely won’t make the government more popular,” especially since they affect people outside the mobilization framework. “Lots of people,” he points out, “are dodging [mandatory term] army service after finishing college, by living in a different city [than where they’re registered] and avoiding summonses. No one ever made much of an effort to track them down. This was the tacit agreement between the state and society. Now, everything is going to change.”

Sources close to the Kremlin agree that the amendments may have a negative effect on the regime’s approval ratings. “Any hint of mobilization or sending people to the front triggers increased anxiety, and they only just managed to reduce it,” says one source. Another speaker, who is close to the United Russia party, replies to a question about the new law’s effect on approval ratings by saying they’re “fucked,” but declines to elaborate the thesis any further.

A source close to the president’s administration notes that the office had counted on the social situation in the country to remain stable until the spring 2024 presidential election. “There was an understanding that you shouldn’t bother the people. But now they’re being bothered.”

Two Kremlin insiders, as well as a source close to the United Russia leadership, admit they don’t yet understand why the draft legislation was passed in such a haste, especially since they haven’t heard of any plans for a new round of mobilization as yet. (On paper, Russia is currently in a state of mobilization. Although the Kremlin insists that it’s over, it has fastidiously avoided issuing a formal decree to that effect.) For now, it is the task of regional governors to persuade people to sign contracts with the military with promises of good money and perks, explains a source close to the president’s executive office. “No one has relieved them of this task,” he says about the regional authorities.

Meanwhile, the Russian army’s recruitment plan for 2023 includes an expectation that its total number of troops will be dramatically augmented. In March, Bloomberg reported that this rapid increase, necessary for continuing the war in Ukraine, could be achieved by recruiting an additional 400,000 contract soldiers that the Defense Ministry likes to refer to as “volunteers.”

Some of these so-called “volunteers” can, no doubt, be found among the conscripts now serving their mandatory terms in the army, but even if most of them are somehow corralled into signing contracts for continued service in the military, this wouldn’t be enough to bring the total size of the Russian army to the desired number. It follows that, without another round of mobilization, the regime simply won’t be able to continue this war.

The Kremlin insiders who talked to Meduza speculated that the new conscription system has been adopted in preparation for Ukraine’s rumored counteroffensive. As one of the speakers puts it, “We need to counter this somehow, for example, by arming millions if need be. Now this will be fairly easy.”

Reportage by Andrey Pertsev

Translated by Anna Razumnaya