MOSCOW - A day after President Vladimir Putin announced a call-up that could sweep 300,000 civilians into military service, thousands of Russians across the country received draft papers on Thursday and some were being marched to buses and planes for training - and perhaps soon a trip to the front lines in Ukraine.
Ms Yanina Nimayeva, a journalist from the Buryatia region of Siberia, said her husband, a father of five and an employee in the emergency department in the regional capital, had been inexplicably called up. She said he received a summons to an urgent 4am meeting where it was announced that a train had been organised to take men to the city of Chita, southeast of Siberia.
Military-age men clogged airports and border crossings trying to flee, and some ended up in distant cities such as Istanbul and Namangan, Uzbekistan. For months, military analysts and Western officials had been predicting that Mr Putin would be forced to impose a draft at some point, given his army's severe losses in Ukraine. But as recently as this week - even as the Russian parliament passed a law that codified a punishment of as much as 10 years in prison for draft dodging - senior officials and the state media insisted that any talk of a draft was part of a Western propaganda campaign.
On social media, activists in regions such as Kabardino-Balkaria in the Caucasus and Yakutia in northeastern Siberia kept a running tally of the summonses that had arrived in various villages. A woman who has already lost one son in the war told a New York Times reporter that three buses carrying newly mobilised soldiers had left her town in Dagestan, in the Caucasus, one of Russia's poorest regions.
After Mr Putin's speech on Wednesday, a backlash did indeed burst into the open, though there was no immediate sign of a nationwide anti-draft movement emerging.
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