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Travelers from Russia cross the border to Georgia.
Would you accept Russian draft dodgers?
In the week since Vladimir Putin declared a partial mobilization, roughly 200,000 draft-eligible Russian men have fled the country, preferring to live in Russia’s neighboring countries as refugees rather than as invading soldiers.
But while most of Russia’s post-Soviet neighbors have welcomed them, the European Union – which has already all but stopped issuing visas to Russians anyway – is split over how to handle a fresh wave of asylum-seekers coming from a country that the bloc is now all-but-directly at war with.
The EU’s president, Charles Michel, says members should admit them as conscientious objectors. Germany and France have signaled a willingness to do so. But the Baltic states, those nearest the Russian border, have a different view: nothing doing.
What’s the right policy? Here are some arguments both for and against rejecting Russian asylum-seekers.
Keep 'em out because …
They are a security risk. EU countries worried about fifth columnists or saboteurs need hundreds of thousands of young Russian men right now like they need a hole in the head. The EU isn’t directly at war with Russia, but it’s fair to assume the bloc’s energy infrastructure and military supply depots are tempting targets for Russian spooks these days. The recent, so-far-unattributed, explosions along the Nord Stream pipelines will only heighten these fears. What’s more, the Baltics have social stability to worry about – they are small countries with sizable, and not-always-happy ethnic Russian minorities to begin with. Don’t light matches near a tinderbox.
Russians should oppose the war at home, not ride it out here. The Estonian Prime Minister says, “Every citizen is responsible for the actions of their state, and citizens of Russia are no exception.” Latvia’s Foreign Minister was less diplomatic, tweeting that if Russians were “fine with killing Ukrainians” earlier in the year, they don’t get to flee their government’s war now.
What little Russian polling there is seems to show strong support for Putin and his “special military operation.” While it’s great so many Russian men now oppose the war — or at least don’t want to die in it themselves — they should be protesting on the streets of Moscow, not looking for work on the streets of Riga.
Why help Putin? Although there are reports of Russian border guards stopping draft dodgers, the frontier is, broadly speaking, open, and there’s probably a reason for that: it rids Putin of the most troublesome objectors as well as the people whose inclusion in the ranks would only sap already-low morale anyway. So if Putin too prefers his draft dodgers on the streets of Riga than on the streets of Moscow, then don’t help him out. As Johns Hopkins Russia scholar Sergey Radchenko has suggested: whatever Putin does with the border, do the opposite.
These aren’t Syrians or Afghans. In recent years, the EU as a bloc has accepted more than a million asylum-seekers from countries ripped apart by civil war. But in this case, Russia is the one doing the ripping. Russians leaving now aren’t fleeing death or destruction. They are — as Latvia’s foreign minister recently put it — simply refusing to “fulfill one’s civic duty in Russia.” Sorry, but that’s not grounds for asylum.
So much for the slam-the-door arguments. What about those for letting Russians in?
No, Russians aren’t responsible for Putin’s decisions. Russia is — we can probably all agree — an unfree, authoritarian country where the people, by definition, have little say over what their government does. So it’s not fair to hold Russians accountable for the actions of their government in the same way as we might for a democracy. Those who want to leave are leaving precisely because they are conscientious objectors to an unjustifiable war launched by a person who is not accountable to them. There is a moral imperative to welcome them.
Sapping Putin’s cannon fodder and brain tank is good. Putin is desperate to rustle up warm bodies to bolster a flagging war effort. Absorbing as many of those bodies as possible is simply good policy, as it will force him to dig deeper into society for the forces he needs. That, in turn, increases the prospect of a broader backlash. What’s more, anything to accelerate Putin’s brain drain is good policy as well — there are a lot of smart young people among the draft dodgers!
Well, over to you, dear reader: if you were in charge of EU asylum policy, what would you do?
Let us know by responding directly or by emailing us here. We’ll include the best responses in an upcoming signal. Please be sure to include your name and location as you’d like them to appear.This article comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.
What We’re Watching: Brazil braces for “moment of truth,” British pound slides, Putin invites chaos, Snowden becomes Russian
Could Lula win it all in Brazil’s first round?
For months, mainstream pollsters have consistently shown Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro trailing his rival, left-wing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by a margin of about 10 points. But a new study shows Lula now has nearly 50% support, the threshold for winning the election in the first round, which takes place next Sunday. How accurate are the polls? Support for Bolsonaro is consistently underestimated because many people are unwilling to admit openly that they’ll vote for him. Pollsters say that’s bogus and that they have a good track record of measuring public opinion over the years. Regardless of whether Bolsonaro and his supporters believe the polls, a more important question remains: will they believe the result if he loses? He has spent months fomenting doubt about the electoral system. Either way, as Brazil’s (pro-Bolsonaro) comms minister Fabio Fara put it to the FT: “the moment of truth is coming.”
Markets reject Truss’s tax plan
The shortest UK premiership to date was 119 days, but stay tuned ... The markets just sent newly installed PM Liz Truss a stark warning over her government’s plan to boost borrowing to fund a $45 billion tax cut. Truss says tax cuts should boost spending and economic growth. But thanks to sky-high inflation, prices are already soaring, and more spending makes those costs harder to tame. This runs counter to the Bank of England’s monetary policy, which aims to temper inflation by raising interest rates and slowing demand. With these approaches at odds, the British pound dropped to a 40-year low Monday, trading as far down as $1.035. The Bank of England responded to say it won’t hesitate to further up interest rates — it just raised the main interest rate last week by 50 basis points — if necessary. The OECD, meanwhile, has downgraded its UK growth forecast for 2023 to zero, and there are growing concerns that Truss’s plans could crash the British economy. Some Tory MPs, according to reports, are already mulling a vote of no confidence, but Eurasia Group expert Mujtaba Rahman says that’s unlikely unless the pound implodes.
GZERO spoke with former PM Tony Blair in recent days about the post-Brexit battle to pull Britain back from the brink. Hear his thoughts here.
Putin’s frantic choreography
Russia’s Vladimir Putin has proven again in recent days that he can set in motion chaotic events involving large numbers of people in multiple countries. His sham referenda, which invite Ukrainians in four regions to vote in favor of joining Russia, are coming to an end, and Putin could announce Russian annexation of them later today or during a speech on Friday. His “partial mobilization” of Russian reservists into the army continues. So do the protests and the rush for Russia’s exits it has unleashed. Anti-draft demonstrations are especially intense in the mainly Muslim Russian region of Dagestan, which has suffered a higher death toll than any other Russian province. The leader of neighboring Chechnya, the strongly pro-war Ramzan Kadyrov, has exempted his province from the draft in protest against Kremlin policies he says are too generous toward Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s counteroffensive continues, and Washington promises to continue new financial and military aid, and continues to warn the Kremlin of the consequences of using a nuclear weapon.
What We’re Ignoring: Citizen Snowden
As of Monday, Edward Snowden — the former US intel contractor who spilled the beans on massive US spying programs — is a citizen of Russia. Snowden has been in Russia for nearly a decade, ever since getting stranded at a Moscow airport while on the international lam from US prosecutors. He joins several other Western icons of varying quality who have become Russian citizens in recent years: martial arts action hero Steven Seagal parlayed the honor into eventually becoming Putin’s “special envoy” to the US. The tax-shirking French actor Gerard Depardieu also got himself a crimson passport from the Kremlin, but he evidently lost it for criticizing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine this spring. No word on whether the 39-year-old Snowden, now that he’s a citizen, will be forced to join that fight as part of Putin’s latest mobilization.This article comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.
A Russian service member stands next to a mobile recruitment center for military service under contract in Rostov-on-Don.
The script for conscripts: Inside Putin’s (partial) mobilization
Russia is raising the stakes in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin’s call for the partial mobilization of Russian reservists — along with holding referenda in occupied parts as well as threatening to use nuclear weapons — has come in the wake of his troops suffering stunning losses at the hands of Kyiv. While the referenda are expected to be sham votes, and nukes are way up the escalation ladder, the mobilization edict is the most immediate of Putin’s three latest moves.
It’s also already affecting the cost, politics, and operations of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Logistically, the mobilization might be bigger than it looks. The 300,000 reservists being asked to report for duty is just the number that’s been announced for now. But the decree is vague by design, as Russian law allows for the spigot effect: once mobilization is underway, any number of men can be called in.
“The Kremlin calls it ‘partial’ so as not to cause panic among the population, but in practice, we are dealing with the first wave of general mobilization,” says Jamestown Foundation analyst Kseniya Kirillova. In early September, she correctly predicted that the referenda — which aim to induct some 15% of Ukrainian territory into Russia — and the mobilization would go hand-in-hand.
Still, Kirillova doubts the call-up will significantly affect the course of the war.
The Institute for the Study of War assesses that Russia has lost 50% to 90% of its strength in some units due to Ukraine’s recent counteroffensive, including vast amounts of armor and vehicles. That means that even if Putin gets more men on the ground, he’s not going to have enough equipment for them to move around.
There are five main arguments to be skeptical about Putin’s mobilization.
- Capacity: conscripts are expected to get just two weeks of training.
- Infrastructure: housing and kitting out the new troops won’t be easy.
- Deployment: coercing men to fight is no good for unit cohesion or morale.
- Attrition: the best men and machines have been lost, so further induction will cover quantity, not quality.
- ”He [Putin] is losing”: although officially the Kremlin claims to have lost just under 6,000 men, a massive mobilization indicates clear desperation and likely hides larger losses.
Still, 300,000 fresh boots on the ground are nothing to sneeze at. Putin’s reservist contingent alone would be the world’s 15th largest military, keeping in mind that Russia already has the world’s fifth-largest standing army.
“These forces won’t win the war, but in the short term they could prevent Russia from losing,” says Christopher Dougherty from the Center for a New American Security. This said, he admits it’ll take more than “third-rate forces using 40-year-old weapons to give the Russians an edge,” even if they are enough to absorb Ukraine’s limited supply of Western weapons.
Also, Putin has other conventional military tricks up his sleeve. For Dougherty, who heads the CNAS wargaming lab, Russia might pursue “a more concerted effort to choke off the flow of Western supplies through conventional strikes or Spetznaz [Special Forces] attacks on the lines of communication.” That would give Putin more options and depth, both of which were in short supply before and likely led to the Kharkiv collapse.
But regardless of whether the Russians are preparing to sustain or intensify combat, there is a worst-case scenario for Putin.
“Mobilization could spark greater internal resistance — even regime change — to the extent a broader call-up is unpopular, battlefield losses persist, sanctions bite deeper into the economy, or elites or parts of the security sector sour on the regime or public unrest surges,” says William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation.
That’s a lot of moving parts, but regime change in Moscow isn’t quite upon us. While the announcement has been met by some protests, with military-age men taking flights and cars out and going into hiding to flee conscription, Putin has countered by staging massive pro-war rallies. Reports of thousands of volunteers signing up have also emerged.
Still, considering the political stakes of risking popular dissent against the war, could getting bogged down in Ukraine and then resorting to conscription be turning this conflict into Putin’s Vietnam with the US draft?
“Vietnam didn’t become Vietnam for a long time,” says Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London and the director for democratic resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis. Putin, he adds, can probably survive this current political moment in terms of public opinion against the war.
For now, Green explains, there’s no organized anti-war movement, partly because it's illegal and partly because the Russians have tried to sell their people a short and quick conflict they don’t have to pay much for. Also, he asks, what happens if you do mobilize against the conflict? “You go to jail. So it's not fully comparable to the US in the ‘60s … unless it becomes a war of attrition.”
“That would involve putting thousands or hundreds of thousands of new troops on the frontlines just to keep things stable on a regular basis and keep on asking the population to keep on making that sacrifice right, '' Greene says. “How is that going to be swallowed?”
While Russia’s top independent pollster says that support for the war has remained static since it began, with 75% in favor, Kirillova argues that even before the announcement of the call-up the tide had begun to turn. Mobilization will certainly strengthen this trend, even though Moscow is searching for new troops in mostly far-flung rural areas where the political opposition is more diluted.
The crux of the mobilization is for Putin to gain a foothold in the already captured territories of Ukraine, she says. “It is possible that he is hoping for a new deal with the West in exchange for a promise not to continue the offensive.”
Finally, the Russian leader is also betting that winter is coming.
Kremlin strategists, Kirillova notes, believe that Europe will not survive the energy crisis and will be much more inclined to compromise in a few weeks. In that case, Putin will never give up the temptation to press on in Ukraine.
“War is now the backbone of Putin's ideology, and he will not be able to abandon it.”
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