Russian MPs on Tuesday passed a law allowing mobilization orders to be sent electronically, a measure that will make it harder to evade the army and complicate the lives of those who have fled abroad.
The deputies of the Duma, the lower house of Parliament, adopted this text in second and third readings, an unusual speed for this law which comes just over a year after the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
“The changes provide for a digitization of the military registry system,” the Duma said in a statement on its website.
Concretely, according to the Russian media, the mobilization orders will be sent via the Gosouslougy system used by millions of Russians for a whole series of administrative procedures.
Once the order has been sent, the mobilized person is prohibited from leaving the country. In the absence of a Gosouslougy account, the electronic order will still be considered valid after seven days, according to the media.
Until then, mobilization orders had to be delivered by hand to the mobilized, which allowed many Russians to ignore these summonses or to have time to move, or even to flee the country, as dozens have done. of thousands of men during the wave of mobilization in September to fight in Ukraine.
“A citizen who can be mobilized will be considered refractory if he has refused to receive his summons or if he cannot be reached,” the Duma said in its press release.
Russian law provides for heavy prison sentences for those who do not join the army.
Asked about the subject earlier on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov assured that “there will be no second wave” of mobilization, after the “partial” one ordered last September by Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Peskov considered this technical change “absolutely necessary” to “perfect and modernize” the national enrollment system.
This wave enabled the mobilization of more than 300,000 men among the reservists, therefore civilians, but was often carried out in a chaotic manner.
Refractory Hunt
According to Peskov, the Kremlin “absolutely does not” expect this new bill to lead to a new wave of departures abroad among Russian men because “it is not related to the mobilization”, he assured reporters.
If Russia hardly communicates on its losses in Ukraine, Western estimates put them at nearly 150,000 killed and wounded and kyiv has announced that it is preparing a counter-offensive in the coming months.
The bill passed by the Duma also provides, according to Russian media, for sanctions that appear to be directed against Russians abroad.
Those fleeing their convocation to the army will thus be prohibited from selling, transferring to relatives or renting their accommodation. They will also not be able to sell their car.
Russians who do not report to the military commissariat within 20 days after their mobilization will no longer be able to work as an entrepreneur or self-employed person, receive loans or register housing and cars.
The police will have the right to search for and arrest the recalcitrant and the tax service, universities and employers will have the duty to transfer the personal data of the persons concerned to the authorities.
The speed with which the bill was examined Tuesday by the Duma has in any case shocked some even in the ranks pro-powers.
“Passing an entire law after a television interview and two hours of familiarization (with the bill) has never happened before,” said Nina Ostanina, a deputy of the Russian Communist Party.
At the same time, the authorities are pursuing a policy of all-out repression of opponents of the offensive in Ukraine, having condemned to heavy sentences several Russians accused of having “discredited” the army or of having set fire to military police stations.
On Tuesday, the head of the powerful security services (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, accused Ukraine and the West of trying to incite the Russians to sabotage and armed rebellion.