Andrei Nikiforov, a St. Petersburg lawyer, was among hundreds of thousands of Russians mobilized since last month to hold the front lines in his country’s faltering war in Ukraine.
On September 25, he received his call-up papers. On October 7, just two weeks later, he was dead.
“We don’t know what happened,” said Alexander Zelensky, the head of the Nevsky Bar Association, of which Nikiforov was a member. Zelensky and a family member of Nikiforov confirmed his call and his death. “All we have is a date and a place.”
That place was Lysychansk, one of the most dangerous places near the front line.
The first coffins are now returning to Russia from Ukraine, carrying the remains of ordinary Russians who were initially promised a quick “special military operation” and have now been selected to go and fight in a war. Their deaths may mark another turning point for Russia in this conflict, where mismanagement has fueled Kremlin infighting and at least half a million men have been conscripted or fled their homes to avoid it.
The newly minted soldiers died within weeks of Vladimir Putin’s September 21 mobilization announcement. On Thursday, the Chelyabinsk region announced the death of five soldiers mobilized from a single military commissariat. Reports on Saturday said four others had died in the Krasnoyarsk region alone. Relatives of some of the men who died said they had been promised two months of training before being sent to the front.
A conscripted reservist says goodbye at a recruiting station in St. Petersburg. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
According to BBC Russian, another 14 have died, even before reaching the front, from causes such as suicide, heart attacks, fights and other mysterious illnesses.
Nikiforov, on the other hand, played the role the Kremlin asked him to: loyal, willing and able. A military veteran who had served in Chechnya, he wasn’t surprised to be called.
“He didn’t hesitate,” Zelensky said, adding that military recruiters had delivered his call-up papers to his home. “He didn’t try to get out of his service. He gathered his things and left. He acted bravely.”
However, the deaths that have come so quickly, some just days after the men were called up, have caused anger at home.
Alexei Martynov, a 28-year-old Moscow government employee, was mobilized on September 23, his father said. His death was confirmed on October 10. “My son is dead, what am I for?” he wrote in a post on October 13. “We don’t know anything other than what was put on the internet,” he told the Observer.
Old photos from Victory Day 2016 showed Martynov in army uniform, two months after completing his mandatory service. According to Natalya Loseva, deputy editorial director of the RT TV channel, he had served in the Semionovsky regiment, whose main activities are ceremonial.
“He had no combat experience,” Loseva wrote in an angry post last week that made Martynov the most high-profile death so far in the mobilization wave. “He was sent to the front within days. He died heroically on October 10.”
Roman Super, a Russian journalist who has reported on the anger among state employees, said Martynov’s death had sparked a backlash among educated cadres of city workers.
“Military leaders, now is not the time to lie,” Loseva wrote. “You have no right to lie and now it’s a crime.”
Anger against Russia’s military leadership had led to considerable infighting in the Russian government, with an insurgency led by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and the founder of the private military company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, calling out individual commanders by name for unable to stop the Ukrainian advance.
Russian conscripts train in the Rostov-on-Don region of southern Russia on October 4, 2022. Photo: Arkady Budnitsky/EPA
Now, with the impact of the mobilization beginning to be felt on the home front, Putin has been forced to defend the process, telling Russians that the calls are likely to conclude within two weeks and that he will order an investigation into violations of the draft procedures.
“The contact line is 1,100 km, so it is almost impossible to hold it exclusively with troops formed by contractors,” Putin said. “This is the reason for the mobilization.”
At a news conference in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, he said on Friday that 16,000 mobilized troops were already fighting in Ukraine and that 222,000 Russians had already been called up.
He said the mobilized Russians will receive five to 10 days of basic training and then five to 15 days of unit training. Combat training would then continue, he stated.
However, some of the deaths clearly show that men have been sent to war much faster than that. Several Russian soldiers captured by the Ukrainians claimed that they had received almost no training.
Meanwhile, Russian recruiting officers are becoming much more aggressive. The Observer has spoken to the relative of a man in Moscow who was arrested on the streets of the city and summarily handed summons papers. In another case, a computer scientist complained that his draft exemption was ignored and that he was not even allowed to say goodbye to his wife and four-month-old daughter before being sent to a basic training
Russia’s mobilization has been marred by reports of desertions, unexplained deaths and suicides. On Friday, the body of a Russian military recruitment officer was found hanging from a fence in the far eastern city of Partizansk.
Some of the deaths in Russia’s mobilization centers have also indicated serious problems with morale. During the training, a man at a military base near St. Petersburg fatally shot himself. Another in Siberia cut his throat in a canteen.
The pro-government Telegram Mash channel reported on Friday that internet censors were now investigating pro-war bloggers and journalists who have criticized Russia’s strange mobilization. The channel claimed that the cases were provoked by the defense ministry.
Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT who has led pro-Kremlin critics of the mistakes made during the mobilization, wrote in his defense: “According to my data, the decision-making authorities have no problem with them.”