After Putin’s speech on Wednesday, a real backlash erupted, though there was no immediate sign of a nationwide anti-draft movement emerging. In the city of Baksan in the Kabardino-Balkaria region, North Caucasus, more than a hundred people gathered near the city government to protest the indictment of their loved ones, said a local activist, who requested anonymity because security.
“Kabardino-Balkaria, like the rest of Russia, woke up yesterday in horror,” Ibragim Yaganov, an activist from the region who is now in Poland, told The Times. “War, somewhere far away on TV, suddenly comes to people’s homes.”
At the United Nations on Thursday, insults, accusations and talk of war crimes vanished as the Security Council met. The meeting was held to discuss the evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses by Russian forces, but Russian diplomats tried to flip the story, seeing Russia as the aggrieved party.
Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, claimed that Ukraine had carried out “an attack” on ethnic Russians in the Donbas region, and said the goal of countries supplying Ukraine with arms was to prolong it. conflict and “weakening and weakening Russia. . . .”
US Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, said, “Tell President Putin to stop the horror he started.” It was the first time since before the war that he and Lavrov were in the same room.
In Moscow, where OVD-Info reported 538 arrests at anti-war rallies on Wednesday, authorities devised a new way to stop the protests: handing out draft summons to protesters. According to OVD-Info, they did so at at least six Moscow police stations where anti-war protesters were arrested.
