Russia’s largest military call-up whips up fear among young men

On April 1, Russia began a new conscription drive with the goal of enlisting 160,000 military-age men between 18 and 30.

It is the largest such call-up since 2011, aiming to fulfil last year’s presidential decree to boost the armed forces to 2.5 million personnel.

And it is making Bogdan, a 21-year-old on the outskirts of Moscow, nervous.

Some young men often try to avoid mandatory military service. But as Russia’s war against Ukraine stands at a critical juncture, with the rival sides desperately attempting to appear triumphant amid peace talks, there is a particular urgency to the matter.

“I received a summons to be drafted in the spring of 2024, despite my hypertension. And by the autumn the police were searching to forcibly conscript me,” Bogdan told Al Jazeera, requesting to withhold his surname fearing reprisal.

He is currently hiding from the authorities.

“I hope that I will be able to register for military service in Saint Petersburg, undergo a new medical examination there and receive a military [exception] due to hypertension. Because in Moscow and the Moscow region, no complaints and court hearings have yielded results. In Moscow, they do not allow me to undergo a new medical examination and want to enlist me according to my summons.”

Rights advocates have warned that the cracks which one might have earlier been able to slip through are tightening, while being a conscript is increasingly risky.

“A year ago there was an age amendment, and now summons are issued to young people from 18-30 years old,” Ivan Chuviliaev, spokesman for the organisation Go By The Forest, which helps people escape the ranks, told Al Jazeera.

Previously, the maximum age for conscription was 27.

“Now the decision of the draft board will be valid not until the end of the draft, but for a whole year. This means it won’t be as easy to run away by simply not showing up when you receive the summons. [Another] major change is that they’re revising the list of illnesses of those ineligible for military service,” Chuviliaev said.

“Those conditions they wouldn’t accept before, they now accept. It’s clear this is simply an artificial creation of chaos, so that doctors will simply stamp Category A fitness for everyone without bothering to dig through their papers. [Thirdly,] various sanctions will be imposed for failure to appear in response to a summons, such as a ban on taking out loans, a ban on opening an individual enterprise, a ban on leaving the country, and so on and so forth.”

According to an open-source tally compiled by the BBC and independent Russian outlet Mediazona, more than 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since 2022 – a figure that frightens young men like Bogdan.

While conscripts are not technically supposed to be deployed to the front lines, “conscripts can be deployed in regions that border Ukraine, including the Belgorod and Kursk regions, and therefore can theoretically participate in combat operations in these regions”, Oleg Ignatov, senior Russia analyst at Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera.

“Conscripts have been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian attacks in the border regions,” he said, adding, “I have not seen any information that conscripts are being sent to the occupied territories” like Donetsk and Luhansk.

Since the onset of the full-scale war in 2022, Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions have come under bombardment and cross-border raids.

“If someone comes into contact with the Ministry of Defence, they will likely sooner or later find themselves in the midst of hostilities,” said Chuviliaev. “Not to mention the fact that any conscript deployment, at any time, even without your own knowledge, can turn out to be a contract.”

He pointed to a recent case in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region in which the local prosecutor’s office recognised that at least 13 conscripts had contracts signed on their behalf illegally and ordered their discharge.

In that case, the commandant simply ignored the court’s order.

Mikhail Liberov, of the Conscientious Objectors’ Movement, told Al Jazeera that while the likelihood of someone receiving a summons actually ending up in combat is “less than one percent … any conscript can, at any time, under one or another form of duress, sign a contract, become a formal soldier and immediately be sent to that very hell”.

“Practice shows that even the prosecutor’s office helps the actions of commanders to force [conscripts] into signing contracts illegally,” he continued.

“The prosecutor’s office doesn’t really care about protecting citizens’ rights and does not file lawsuits in their interests. Sometimes signatures on conscripts’ contracts are simply forged.”

There are ways, lawful and otherwise, to evade military service. These include health grounds and unfitness to serve; court appeals; higher education; certain family circumstances; feigning mental or physical illness; going into hiding; leaving the country; or applying for alternative civil service. Politicians and members of certain professions – for example, in the military-industrial complex – are also exempt.

“Each of these deferrals requires you to take action – the draft board won’t do it automatically,” Chuviliaev explained.

“You need to go [to the office], bring all the necessary documents, [or] draw up a power of attorney, preferably for relatives, so they can present those documents to the enlistment office and not the draftee themselves.”

Liberov listed a number of other complications that might arise.

“[Educational] deferrals are not available to everyone, and only postpone the problem – those who have completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree inevitably face the same problem at about 22 and 24 years old, respectively,” he said.

“Not everyone can afford to leave the country: often the lack of an overseas passport becomes an obstacle, the registration of which is mistakenly considered impossible without a military ID or a visit to the military registration and enlistment office.”

Liberov said that while alternate civil service – for example, working in state-run services such as hospitals or libraries – is an option for conscientious objectors, whose religious or personal beliefs are incompatible with military service, in practice, the authorities refuse most such requests.

Then, like Bogdan, there are those who simply go on the run.

But in Moscow, it is useless to hide, warned Liberov.

“You can only stay at home”, he said, given the Russian capital’s “total digitalisation and surveillance system.”