MOSCOW – Russian police arrested more than 100 people at the weekend in the southern region of Dagestan at a protest against Moscow’s troop mobilisation, non-governmental organisation OVD-Info said.
Dagestan – a poor, Muslim-majority republic in the North Caucasus – has seen more men killed in the Kremlin’s military offensive in Ukraine than any other part of Russia, according to a tally made by independent Russian media of death notices published online.
OVD-Info, a human rights monitor, said late yesterday that police had arrested at least 101 people in Makhatchkala, the capital of Dagestan in southwestern Russia.
Russian media showed videos of women arguing with police during the protest.
“Why are you taking our children?” one shouts.
Other videos show police violently detaining demonstrators.
In a bid to calm the population, Dagestan’s military commissioner Daitbeg Mustafayev, who is in charge of troop recruitment, said at the weekend only men “with special military skills” would be called up in the first instance and no conscripts would be sent to Ukraine.
OVD-Info said more than 2,300 protesters have been arrested in protests across Russia since September 21, when President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilisation for the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Many draft-age men have fled abroad.
Kremlin critics say Moscow focuses its military call-up drives on Russia’s poorest, most remote regions.
Dagestan is one of Russia’s poorest regions. It was scarred by conflict in the early 2000s, when Kremlin forces battled Islamist rebels. – AFP, September 26, 2022
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