In the name, the usual “asvabaditeley” (liberators) scheme is used. The contract also includes intermediate participation in staging elections. There should be no eyewitnesses to the occupation. Therefore, on an industrial scale, Russia utilizes the inhabitants of the occupied territories, as well as its own citizens, who have seen the real Ukraine.
Forcible mobilization of the civilian population in occupied territories, or even the involvement of civilians in the organization of military operations, is expressly prohibited by Article 51 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
Article 8 of the Rome Statute expressly makes it a war crime to compel nationals of an opposing party to participate in hostilities against their own country, even if they were in the service of the belligerent before the outbreak of war.
Even voluntary participation in the war on the side of the enemy is considered participation in a terrorist group or terrorist organization, as well as organizational or other assistance in the creation or activity of a terrorist group or terrorist organization is a criminal offence.
However, this does not stop Russia from using massively violent methods to drive the inhabitants of the occupied territories into its army as cannon fodder.
In addition, the empire uses a scheme developed over centuries as a result of colonial aggressive policy.
First, Russia attracts voluntary collaborators. It harshly suppresses active resistance to the occupation, squeezes out those who do not agree and does not affect the “passive majority” from the occupied territories. At the same time, every time in the first phase of occupation, the majority of residents of the occupied territories have a much higher level of social and economic rights than, for example, in other territories of the empire.
This was the case with the occupied territories of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions from 2014 to 2022. In the first phase, local “volunteers” from among pro-Russian collaborators were recruited for military functions.
Moreover, there were not so many willing. According to the testimony of one of the residents of the men’s labour dormitory for employees of one of the mines in the city of Donetsk, in the summer of 2014, out of almost half a thousand residents, as many as two volunteered to fight for the so-called DPR, and then performed the auxiliary function of being on duty at checkpoints and patrolling the city.
Another reason for engaging in collaborative and terrorist activities was economic motives.
However, since the summer of 2019, the occupiers began to encourage residents of the occupied territories to obtain Russian passports. Their owners were offered additional privileges, and those who categorically refused to take them faced restrictions and discrimination, for example, in obtaining property rights and receiving social services.
Then passported men were forced to register for military service.
Passports are participation in elections. Participation in elections with printed electronics for a pro-government party or candidate meant loyalty to the occupational authorities.
Why this was done became obvious on the eve of a large-scale Russian invasion.
On 18 February 2022, representatives of the occupational authorities, and the leaders from the DPR and LPR collaborators, simultaneously announced a statement about the “large-scale evacuation of residents to Russia” under the pretext that Ukraine is allegedly going to go on the offensive soon.
At the same time, a general mobilization was announced with a call for men in reserve to come to the military commissariats, closing any possibility of physical departure outside the occupied territories.
There were not many who wanted to fight.
However, not all ORDLO residents were allowed to evacuate. Men of conscription age from 18 to 55 were forbidden to leave the occupied territories. They were removed from the flights and sent to military commissars. Official summons were sent to everyone. It was practically impossible to evade mobilization.
Mobilization was not carried out by the military commissars but by the “Ministry of State Security”. Together with the military, they surrounded each neighborhood. An apartment-by-apartment inspection was conducted. All men were taken to the transfer point.
The Russian occupiers took everyone who came into their sight, people with diseases, criminals, the elderly, parents with many children, and even minors. Raids took place simply on the streets. There were cases when meetings of labour union workers were gathered and they were forcibly taken to war en masse, as it happened at one of the factories of the so-called LPR, where 400 workers were taken at the same time.
University students in the occupied territories were forcibly mobilized.
In occupied Donetsk, the local philharmonic orchestra musicians were tricked into being mobilized into the ranks of the “army of the DPR” under the control of the Russian Federation. They were sent to Mariupol. It is known that some of them died almost immediately, including the famous jazzman Mykola Zvyagintsev.
Journalist Denys Kazanskyi explained about this.
According to Kazansky, the Philharmonic Orchestra musicians were invited allegedly to film a TV story. On the spot it was announced that they would be immediately sent to the front. Subsequently, the musicians were thrown under Mariupol without any preparation, where they were used as bait to identify the firing points of the city defenders.
Under such conditions, most of the musicians died almost immediately. They were thrown into the front line of battle.
According to local residents, 55 musicians were forcibly sent to the front from the philharmonic hall.
This case is not isolated. The “DNR” militants did the same to other artists – from the Donetsk Opera and Circus.
In total, more than one hundred thousand residents of the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions were forcibly mobilized into the occupation army during 2022-2023. Practically without any preparation, they were thrown like cannon fodder into the first waves of “meat” assaults.
Russian tactics anticipate the possibility of mass deaths of the first waves of their attackers, mainly “mobs”, to identify the firing points of the Ukrainian army and further involve more professional formations. They act according to the principle of “not our own – no harm”. Especially since Putin, like Stalin, considers all men who lived on the Ukrainian state territory and did not run with flowers to meet Russian “liberators” in the spring of 2014 as criminals.
Almost none of those mobilized in 2022-2023 remained unscathed, most of them died and were seriously injured in “meat” assaults.
By March 2024, the situation in the occupied territories of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions was significantly different. There, as in the first phase of the occupation of ORDLO, the local population was not immediately affected.
At first, the residents of the occupied regions were forcibly passported.
After that, all the data of men of draft age was transferred to the recruiting stations and the men were immediately registered as members of the so-called territorial defence unit in a specific settlement.
Moreover, in the summer of 2022, the so-called governor of the occupied part of the Kherson region, the collaborator Volodymyr Saldo, declared that mobilization in the region was not planned. According to him, local residents seem to voluntarily join the ranks of the Russian army or other military formations.
After the staged voting in the so-called Putin elections on 15-17 March, where the result for Putin in the Kherson region was higher than the national average (over 88%), and in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region (over 92%), there will be no more fighting with the locals.
It is necessary to urgently replenish the colossal losses received during the so-called winter ‘meat’ offensive, when they fought not with skill, but with numbers.
The fact that the Russians are engaged in covert mobilization of local residents in the temporarily occupied territories was reported by the Centre of National Resistance (CNS).
“Mobilization takes place covertly upon receipt of a Russian passport. Formally, all mobilized are volunteers. At the same time, it is impossible to refuse the contract,” the Central Bureau of Statistics notes.
So far, Putin has already successfully disposed of the majority of those mobilized from the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, so gathering more “meat” from about half a million Ukrainians in the occupied territory of Kherson Oblast and approximately 350,000 from Zaporizhzhia is a necessity and a real plan of the occupiers, which they will try to implement some time soon. There will be even less of a fight here than in Donbas. The predominantly Ukrainian ethnic composition, and the history of active resistance to the occupiers in February and early spring 2022, pushes the Russian authorities to commit yet another terrible war crime, to which the international community and all “peacekeepers” from Beijing to the Vatican turn a blind eye.
To drive the Ukrainians of the occupied territories to slaughter, as Stalin did with the white knights in 1943, is Putin’s real sinister plan to dispose of the population of the occupied territories. Because Putin does not liberate anything or anyone, he only destroys…
