Putin wanted to undo the breakup of the USSR, but his miscalculations may instead result in a second breakup, of the Russian Federation this time.
theins.ru
However, the poor results of the army in the first attempt at seizing Ukraine and the need for more troops have led Putin to try to find every warm body he could throw in the fire without having to go through actual declaration of war and general mobilization. The one thing he fears is an uprising of the people in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the only two cities that really matter in Russia. So they've sent troops that should never have been sent, like the instructors from the military academies (so now there's a problem to train new recruits...), the Rosgvardia riot cops who are trained to deal with unruly mobs but not with well-equipped, well-trained enemy soldiers, the Wagner scum recruited from prisons... and since that was not enough, those regional battalions of volunteers from the poorest regions of Russia, lured in with the promise of a good wage. And that's a huge *censored*up. The Russian army will be greatly diminished and demoralized by this war, and now potentially separatist regions will have their own armies that will not stay loyal to the Kremlin. A third Chechen War, for example, might be lost by Russia this time -- and if something like this happens, it will snowball. Especially in the Russian Far East, where Russia's extremely trustworthy friend and ally China would, no doubt, be very interested in the sudden appearance of small independent countries that would very quickly become China's client-states instead of Russia's.
It's at this kind of things you see how stupid the invasion of Ukraine was, and how incredibly stupid Putin has become.
Москва не за нами. Война с Украиной поставила под угрозу территориальное единство России
Мобилизуя силы для войны в Украине, Кремль сделал ставку на формирование подразделений в бедных российских регионах, в том числе в национальных республиках, и это дало неожиданный результат. Батальоны, сформированные по этническому или земляческому принципу, не горят желанием воевать за Москву...
theins.ru
Moscow is not behind us. The war with Ukraine threatened the territorial unity of Russia
Vyacheslav Epureanu
9 September 2022
While mobilizing forces for the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin staked on the formation of units in poor Russian regions, including national republics, and this has yielded unexpected results. Battalions formed along ethnic or compatriot lines are not eager to fight for Moscow, and the worse things get on the front, the more anti-war sentiment grows among the soldiers themselves and in their home regions. Given that the war was followed by an economic crisis, the social tension becomes truly explosive, except that if before the regions felt powerless, now they have their own small armies.
Russian-style National Battalions
Recruitment of volunteers for the war in Ukraine is going on all over the country through various channels as part of a coordinated campaign of covert mobilization. People are invited to join private military companies (including directly in penal colonies), as well as various units of the "DPR" and "LPR" and, in fact, the official power structures: units and formations of the Armed Forces, Rosgvardiya and the country's Battle Army Reserve (BARS), subordinated to the Ministry of Defense.
Another mechanism for attracting manpower is the creation of volunteer volunteer battalions in the Russian regions. Russian propaganda has firmly attached the expressions "national" or "nationalist battalion" (natsbat) and "volunteer battalion" (dobrobat) to the Ukrainian paramilitary units that emerged during the initial war in the Donbass with pro-Russian separatists. In particular, these included the Azov, Donbass, Aidar, Dnepr, and other battalions, which were created on a territorial basis and were staffed, among other things, by members of right-wing political movements and soccer ultras. They were called National Battalions because of the wide spread of nationalist and, in some cases, neo-fascist views among the battalion personnel and commanders. In any case, there have been no Natsbat in Ukraine for a long time now. The notorious Azov battalion and other volunteer battalions were transformed into regular military units and integrated into the Ukrainian security forces - the AFU and the National Guard - or simply disbanded. But now the National Battalions are popping up like mushrooms after the rain in the Russian regions.
In Russia, a natsbat, or national battalion, has a slightly different meaning: it is a military unit formed from volunteers in any national autonomy on the principles of ethnic homogeneity or common origin. Volunteer battalions are also formed in "Russian" subjects, i.e. ordinary oblasts and krais, but even there the ideological basis is based on compatriotism and an appeal to a common regional identity. It is assumed that one or more battalions will appear in each of the 85 subjects. According to The Insider's calculations, at least 44 Russian regions, including 12 ethnic regions, have already established such units or announced their recruitment. A total of 73 local battalions are known, including 23 in the ethnic regions.
All the battalions of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation use "name" names and clear territorial affiliation on an ethnic or compatriot basis.
For example, the tasks of the Tiger battalion, which is being recruited in Primorsky Krai, have been described by the local governor, Oleg Kozhemyako, as assistance to fellow countrymen fighting in the war. The battalion is being formed with the help of officers of the 155th Separate Guards Marine Brigade (155 OBRMP), stationed in Vladivostok.
The set of symbolic images and historical narratives used in the formation of regional battalions is extremely curious. For example, the Yakut battalion is called Bootur in honor of the mythical ancestor of all Yakuts. The "Toyan" battalion from the Tomsk region was named after a prince of the Eushtin Tatars who lived in the 17th century on the banks of the Tom River.
One of the battalions assembled in the Republic of Mordovia was named after the Mordovian hero Siyazhar. In neighboring Mari El three battalions at once bear the names of the defenders of the Mari land: Iden, Poltysh and Akpatr. Poltysh is a real historical personage, Mari prince, who defended his native land from the Russian troops of czar Ivan the Terrible.
In Bashkortostan they took a different path and referred to the memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Chechen war. One of the Bashkir battalions was named after General Minigali Shaimuratov, a newly minted WWII hero, and another was named after Alexander Dostavalov, a participant in the second Chechen war.
In the "Russian" subjects, the names for the battalions are mostly related to local toponymy and history. In Kirov Oblast, the historical name of the region Vyatka was modified for the battalion into "Vyatka. In Khabarovsk region, the battalion "Baron Korff" refers to the first governor of the Amur region, Baron Andrei Korff. In St. Petersburg, the battalions bear the iconic names "Kronstadt," "Neva," and "Pavlovsk."
In the Chuvash "Atӑl" (translated as "Volga") battalion, one of the requirements for candidates is knowledge of the Chuvash language.
The Tatar squads "Alga" (Tatar for "forward") and "Timer" (translated as "iron") are referred to in the local media as national battalions.
And even in the conditionally "Russian" regions there are proposals to create ethnically homogeneous units. For example, in Perm Krai, in addition to "Parma" and "Molot" battalions, which include all local residents, they intend to create a battalion of ethnic Uzbeks (!), called "Amir Timur". The initiative was put forward by the Central Asian Society of Uzbeks of Perm Region, but it has received support so far. Moreover, the government of Uzbekistan promised to prosecute all of its citizens who will go to fight in Ukraine for mercenarism.
Separate regional battalions are initially created with a species specificity different from the usual motorized rifle units. In the Kursk region, the Seim battalion (the name of the local river) is claimed as an auxiliary logistic unit. Tank battalions are being created in Perm Krai ("Molot") and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast (Kuzma Minin battalion). The Ulyanovsk Region is recruiting volunteers for the engineer-sapper battalion Sviyaga and the howitzer-artillery battalion Simbirsk.
Some regions prefer not to get involved with volunteers. For example, Arkhangelsk Region has taken under patronage the active motorized rifle battalion of the 200th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet which is manned predominantly by natives of the region. The battalion was given the honorary name of "Arkhangelsky".
And in some places ethnic homogeneous units in the form of companies and platoons arise under the auspices of BARS units. In particular, volunteers from Tuva fight in these units, and the head of the republic, Vladislav Khovalyg, willingly shares with the public the fantastic details of their feats of arms. According to him, almost all Tuvinians are awarded state decorations and in the intervals between combat missions they entertain their comrades-in-arms with Tuvan throat singing, reciting poems, playing the guitar and accordion.
The Chechen volunteer battalion "Akhmat" is a separate story. Everyone who wants to go there is recruited, including people with a criminal record, and sometimes Chechens who have done wrong by the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, are forcibly enrolled. The combat skills of its soldiers are questionable, in contrast to their outstanding talents for making TikTok videos and torturing prisoners of war.
Moreover, the Akhmat battalion is built on the principles of ethnic segregation. The first wave of attack usually includes fighters of non-Chechen origin, while ethnic Chechens form the second echelon.
At the same time Kadyrov created four full-fledged national battalions, not of volunteers, but of regular cadres of the Chechen security forces, totaling 1,800 men. In all, Kadyrov claims, 9,000 fighters were trained in Chechnya for shipment to Ukraine, and another 10,000 men are in reserve.
On the whole, judging by open data, recruitment to the Russian National Battalions is going on creakily. The authorized strength of the battalion is 400 to 600 people, but a significant number of the regions initially set the bar low at 200-300 people. Despite enormous (by the standards of the Russian regions) salaries at the level of 200 thousand rubles a month and lump-sum payments from the local budgets of 200-300 thousand rubles, only Cossack units, Tuvinian, Ossetian and Chechen volunteers, as well as several companies from other regions are present in the combat zone.
There have already been examples in history when the formation of military units based on the principle of ethnic homogeneity led to the disintegration of the state. For example, the Polish legions of the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the collapse of the country in 1918 became the basis for the army created on its wreckage by independent Poland. Russia after the February revolution in 1917 had an unsuccessful experience of Ukrainianization of some parts of the army and navy.
Obviously, even today, the national armed forces, financed from local budgets, manned by natives of one region and emphasizing their national or regional identity by a special set of symbols and values, can relatively easily be "switched" from participation in the war for the "unity of Ukrainians and Russians" to the unjust position of their own ethnos/subject in the over-centralized Russian Federation. And the preconditions for this are in place; local anti-war movements are actively developing in the regions.
Anti-war ethnic movements
Vladimir Putin likes to mention not only the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, but also the unity of the peoples within Russia. However, not all representatives of the ethno-national (or even some "Russian") regions of the Russian Federation support the war he has unleashed, and do not want to take part in it.
Buryatia
The first ethnic anti-war initiative in Russia was the Free Buryatia Foundation. The organization provides legal support to contract soldiers who do not want to fight and denounces ethnic racism and xenophobia in Russia.
"Since 2015, we have had a trail of 'Putin's fighting Buryats,' which was constructed by the Kremlin, among others," says Alexandra Garmazhapova, head of the foundation. - And we realized that we needed to express our position, that we don't agree with this war. We made several anti-war videos and each time there were more of us - this is how the foundation was formed. Relatives of Buryat (and later, not only Buryat) contract servicemen started writing to us, asking us to help them break their contracts. This was back in March. And we urgently had to look for lawyers. It was obvious that it would be pretty irresponsible to turn around and say, "Guys, we just wanted to shoot one anti-war video, and then you can take it from there. At first we thought that there were a few of them, then dozens. As a result we had over 500 people who turned to us for advice. Recently we managed to return 150 contract servicemen who refused to fight back to Buryatia".
Kalmykia
Soon after the hostilities began, an anti-war movement emerged in Kalmykia, whose participants also began by recording a video: they spoke out against the war, recalled the persecution of Kalmyks in the USSR and the oppression of ethnic minorities in modern Russia, and urged their fellow countrymen not to participate in military actions in Ukraine.
"The way the Kremlin uses Russia's national minorities is a manipulation," believes Dorji Mandzhiev, deputy head of the Yabloko party in the republic of Kalmykia and organizer of the anti-war movement Kalmyks Against the War. - At least 12 people from Kalmykia have already died in the war, but for three hundred thousand people of Kalmykia it is a large figure. What did they die for? For the ambitions of the dictator and this regime? Not a single life of a Russian is worth it. Our movement was created so that together we could influence the situation in our region at least, so that Kalmyks wouldn't go to this murderous war and genocide, so that they would understand that the Kremlin has brought us to the point that people are ready to give their lives and body parts for some small crumbs from the bar table. At the average salary of $200 a month, the commissariat is beckoning and giving 300 thousand rubles as an allowance for the military. This is madness, but the people have been driven to such despair that they are ready to give up their lives and leave their families.
Manjiyev is sure that the anti-war movement is only the starting point from which the further struggle for federalization will begin: "This war was the impetus for the self-consciousness of the peoples. That is, the Kremlin only uses us when it needs to. It turns out that when there is a war, "we are all brothers," and in our free time "you are churks" and "we only rent to Slavs. The Kremlin considers us just meat, which can be used on the front line. Ukrainians were also called brothers. But you don't do that to brothers. I think that in the future all this will develop into a self-consciousness of the national republics - we will demand from the Kremlin real federalization, not just on paper. If this question isn't solved, it could end in a civil war.
Tyva
An anti-war movement of its own has appeared in Tyva. Activists not only tell the truth about the war, but also help soldiers return home from Ukraine. In June, nine soldiers from the Tuvan brigade, who were on assignment in Kyrgyzstan and were preparing to be sent to Ukraine, were able to terminate their contracts early and return to Tyva with the help of members of the movement.
"The need to find a community of anti-war Tuvan like-minded people arose for many of us when the war began. But finding such people was a non-trivial task," a New Tyva activist tells The Insider. - It all started when one of the future co-founders of our movement began to study the comments on the anti-war Instagram posts "Asians of Russia." She found people who condemned the war and, if it was clear that it was someone from Tyva, she wrote them personal messages. That's how a small core of people who cared and wanted to act was formed. The creation of the organization was also spurred on by several events: the news about the nephew of the co-founder who died, the statistics that emerged about the large number of Tuvinian war dead, and radio intercepts of Tuvinian communicators, from which it became clear that they were being used on the front lines because of their different language. In addition, Eres Kara-Sal, a deputy from Tyva, greatly helped develop the organization. Thanks to his publicly expressed anti-war stance and several interviews, more Tuvinians have signed up. First of all we try to convince our fellow countrymen not to support this war through assistance in cancelling military contracts, direct communication with contract servicemen and their families and, of course, informing them about the real state of affairs in the war. The participants of the movement are mostly from Tyva, but we help not only Tuvan contract servicemen, but in general anyone who applies. It happens more than once that some Tuvinian soldiers turn to us for help to terminate their contract and return home, and with them, for example, some of their Russian comrades-in-arms. We don't refuse to help anyone.
Like like-minded people from Kalmykia, the Tuvinians see the anti-war struggle as part of the federalization movement: "We will continue to do our activities until the war is over. But we hope that after it is over, something more will be born out of the movement. Something that will set Tyva on the path of democracy and help create the conditions for the true federalization of Russia.
Yakutia
In Yakutia, dissenters to the war have created a community called Sakha vs War. Here's what one of its organizers told The Insider:
"Members of our movement have an extremely negative attitude toward all military aggressions by the Kremlin, both against sovereign states (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine) and within regions of Russia, referring to the Chechen wars for Ichkeria's independence. From the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, back in 2014, activists of our movement openly spoke out against the annexation of Crimea. Unfortunately, after the law on discrediting the Armed Forces was passed, we had to go underground and create an Instagram page, through which we actively communicate our point of view. There are talented and creative people living in our republic, thanks to whom tourism, IT, cinematography, art, science and sports were actively developing before the war. We are an ambitious and bright people. The war crossed out our future and put a bloody cross on it.
The war opened up many festering boils on the body of the Russian state: there is racism, and the imposition of imperialist values from Moscow, and the lack of the right to self-determination of the small nationalities of Russia, and a centralized government which takes all the wealth of the regions to Moscow. Our task is to give a good stir to the Yakut information field, by drawing attention to these and other long overdue questions and problems. We want to shake up the swamp of years of fear and silence. Our community has attracted the attention of many other anti-war movements and now rallies around us all the opponents of war from Yakutia and other regions.
Signs of half-life
The economic crisis that followed the war is intensifying separatist sentiments, because the regions do not really understand why they have to take the fall for Moscow's suicidal policies. The regions are already facing a decline in industrial production, unemployment and reduced budget revenues. As for unemployment - the most explosive indicator - rather detailed estimates are available: the regions with large industrial clusters and export-oriented enterprises, such as the Kurgan, Kaluga, Samara regions, the Komi Republic and Tatarstan, will suffer the most. But regions with weak undiversified economies and a large share of the public sector (the North Caucasus republics and Tyva) will feel almost no decline in the labor market.
Ultimately, none of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation has yet seen a combination of all three disturbing signs in terms of separatism: the creation of local volunteer battalions, a strong anti-war movement with an ethnic or regional component, and serious challenges to socio-economic stability.
But at least ten regions have two of the three signs. The Insider spoke with regionalist Nikolai Petrov about how the war and crisis might affect the country's regions and unity.
Nikolai Petrov, Russian political scientist and political geographer
Tuva, Buryatia, Kalmykia, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Ingushetia are all national republics which, in the socio-economic development of regions expert Natalia Zubarevich's typology, belong to the Fourth Russia. These are national republics, and their behavior does not fit the general patterns that work in most other Russian regions. They were governed for many years by ethnic elites, but now the situation is changing or has already changed - as in Dagestan, where Moscow is replacing the local root elite with outsiders without much effect. But in reaction to the sanctions and the crisis, then, strangely enough, they may feel better in the dynamics, that is less affected by the negative effect of sanctions than many other more developed regions than the capitals and large industrialized regions, only because they are largely subsidized. This is purely a budgetary sphere. Although it is clear that, eventually, the negative effect will sooner or later affect the financial and economic support that these republics receive from the federal center.
For many years, my colleagues and I have been rating the socio-economic and political well-being of the regions from 2015 to 2020, based on a whole range of indicators: economic statistics, political dynamics, and protests. In the socio-economic aspect, we assessed two categories of risks: short-term risks related to the dynamics of household incomes, regional budget revenues and production dynamics; and medium-term risks related to the dynamics of trade turnover, budget debts and investment dynamics, that is, what can lead to growing tensions in the short term and what can also lead to this in the medium term. At the same time, we assessed the socio-economic situation both from the point of view of households (income and trade turnover), and from the point of view of regions and regional budgets.
In the North Caucasus the economic risks for households have always been high, and Dagestan has always been among the regions with the highest risks, because the political risks there were coupled with an active protest movement.
If we look at the Russian regions in terms of the level of wages, say, last year, we see that Kalmykia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and North Ossetia are at the very bottom of this rating. At the same time, Kalmykia is the poorest region in terms of wages. Thus, 20% of the population there have salaries lower than 15,000 rubles a month. Next comes Dagestan which has approximately the same indicators as Ingushetia and Kalmykia. Things are a little better in North Ossetia, even better in Tuva and Buryatia, but it depends on what indicators we are looking at: in absolute value of wages Tuva and Buryatia look much more decent than the regions of the North Caucasus. But these are regions with northern premiums, and the consumer basket there is much more expensive. So when economists look at the ratio of income to the cost of the basket of goods and services, and at the share of the population below the poverty line, Tuva is the absolute champion, while Kalmykia and Ingushetia are very close behind. At the same time, Tuva is the only region where the ratio of income to the cost of the basket is less than one, that is, the average level of income is not enough to provide a minimum set of goods and services. One third of the population lives below the poverty line. North Ossetia and Dagestan have a slightly better situation, but they are all below the Russian average.
We must understand that when we talk about Russian economic statistics, especially for the national republics, these figures are very inaccurate - especially the figures for the North Caucasus. That is, the stratification is great and the standard of living is generally low, but we must not absolutize the numbers that we see in the Rosstat performance. We can say that all these regions are in a fairly deplorable condition, but precisely because they did not thrive before the crisis and before the sanctions. For them, the impact of the crisis is now less noticeable and distinguishable than for regions such as Tatarstan, which were among the leaders, but today are losing a lot because of the sanctions and their consequences.
All the regions we are talking about are regions subsidized by the federal center, and as such, they feel almost the same today as they felt yesterday or the day before yesterday. Their losses will be associated with a deterioration of the socio-economic situation in the country as a whole, with budget cuts primarily for subsidies to the regions and assistance to regional budgets, although the North Caucasus has been and remains one of the very important priorities for the Kremlin.
At the same time, we are talking about small regions, and the population is largely rural, not urban. This means that there is some level of stability there thanks to the fact that people are much less dependent on the work of industrial enterprises and the money that citizens may receive for this work, but largely on themselves and their own plots. Although these national regions belong to the Fourth Russia, typologically they are adjacent to the Third, which is made up of rural hinterland dependent on pensions. They, in turn, will continue to be indexed, but there is no dependence on the income of industrial enterprises, nor on the efficiency of their work, nor on the very fact that large industrial enterprises operate.
In each of these republics, even in the smallest Ingushetia, there are different clans whose interests are balanced in one way or another. In Dagestan, for example, representatives of the major ethnic groups control the main spheres of the economy, and as soon as the balance starts to change, it will directly affect the interests of the ethnic clans, and through them, the ethnic groups. And in the situation of Dagestan, where ethnic groups are compactly settled, this acquires a territorial dimension and can cause a social explosion like what we saw in the republic in the past. It will be very difficult to maintain the balance, and any friction and change in the balance, any shifts in the interests of different ethnic clans will be a destabilizing factor in one way or another.
As for the situation with the split of the Russian Federation, this is not a one-time event, but a chain of actions and their consequences. The main problem, I think, should not be seen in the fact that some ethnic clans want to secede. The problem is that in the conditions of super-centralization, it is Moscow that can provoke the conflicts that will ultimately lead to the prospect of the splitting of the country. But not because anyone today wants and is able to advance slogans of secession from Russia, but because the Kremlin, trying to manage the centrally shifting situation, distributing money and maintaining a balance of interests of ethnic groups or ignoring that balance, will lead to destabilization. Then a chain emerges - the interests of ethnic clans are violated, this can lead to serious protests on a variety of occasions, and if the response to these protests is not balanced and calibrated enough, it can lead to strengthening rather than weakening the conflict. Unfortunately, the Kremlin cannot react quickly and accurately, because the situation is much less visible from Moscow than it is from within the region. (Read Nikolai Petrov's entire column on the impact of war and sanctions on Russia's prospects for disintegration here.)
It's important to remember that the Russian Army, like the Red Army before it, practice ethnic quota and enforced mixing in its troops precisely so as to prevent the creation of ethnic battalions. Ethnic minorities this way are diluted and always have several ethnic Russians as their brothers-in-arms.However, the poor results of the army in the first attempt at seizing Ukraine and the need for more troops have led Putin to try to find every warm body he could throw in the fire without having to go through actual declaration of war and general mobilization. The one thing he fears is an uprising of the people in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the only two cities that really matter in Russia. So they've sent troops that should never have been sent, like the instructors from the military academies (so now there's a problem to train new recruits...), the Rosgvardia riot cops who are trained to deal with unruly mobs but not with well-equipped, well-trained enemy soldiers, the Wagner scum recruited from prisons... and since that was not enough, those regional battalions of volunteers from the poorest regions of Russia, lured in with the promise of a good wage. And that's a huge *censored*up. The Russian army will be greatly diminished and demoralized by this war, and now potentially separatist regions will have their own armies that will not stay loyal to the Kremlin. A third Chechen War, for example, might be lost by Russia this time -- and if something like this happens, it will snowball. Especially in the Russian Far East, where Russia's extremely trustworthy friend and ally China would, no doubt, be very interested in the sudden appearance of small independent countries that would very quickly become China's client-states instead of Russia's.
It's at this kind of things you see how stupid the invasion of Ukraine was, and how incredibly stupid Putin has become.
