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Is this Putin’s last, desperate gamble?

In a caricature by the country’s most prominent political cartoonist, Sergey Elkin, Vladimir Putin is standing on top of the Kremlin wall with his arms outstretched. “So what else do I need to do for you guys to finally start rebelling?” Putin asks, with a look of desperation. As images showing thousands of Russian men getting into buses bound for training centres appeared last weekend, many in the west are asking the same question.

Putin’s decision to call the first mobilisation since the second world war has prompted widespread panic among Russia’s population, and there was a growing sense early this week that tensions are rising, as angry showdowns at local draft centres played out in videos published to social media and rumours circulated over an impending closure of the borders or even martial law.

On Monday a draft officer was shot in Ust-Ilimsk, a town of about 85,000 people in the Irkutsk region in Siberia, by a man angry at his friend’s conscription. In Ryazan, another man set himself on fire in a protest. Angry crowds also gathered in Russia’s Dagestan region, where officers fired automatic weapons in the air to disperse them. Meanwhile, thousands of cars lined up at the Russian borders carrying young men seeking to flee the country in order to escape the draft.

On Monday the Kremlin sought to calm Russians, saying no decisions had been made to shut the borders or impose martial law. But the backlash had already begun.

Experts have predicted that the effect of the call-up on public opinion will be gradual. “Russian society has been repressed to the core and has become compliant,” said Andrei

Kolesnikov, of the Carnegie Moscow Center thinktank, who has researched the country’s attitudes towards the conflict. But his research, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also found that Russian public support for the war against Ukraine is less solid than statistics generally suggest, leading him to believe that Putin’s mobilisation order might prove to be a costly gamble.

Several draft centres have been torched in recent days, and police made hundreds of arrests across the country in order to disperse local protests sparked by the announcement.

Men recently mobilised by proRussian occupation officials in Ukraine were also being readied for the frontline, including newly drafted personnel in Crimea as well as conscripts in Luhansk region who have received draft summonses in recent days.

On the eve of Putin’s address, hundreds of Muscovites gathered on the touristy Arbat Street to protest against the mobilisation. “No to war!” they chanted. Riot police and national guardsmen in camouflage quickly blocked off the street and began diving into the crowds to make arrests, many of those detained being young men.

“I have been coming out [to protest] since the very beginning of the war,” said Irina, 32, an accountant. She said she had considered fleeing the country but ultimately decided

to stay. “It’s important because I’m against the murder of people in a neighbouring country and that my people become murderers.”

More worryingly for the Kremlin, observers say, is the unrest that is bubbling up away from the big cities and in the regions, traditionally strongholds of the regime.

Perhaps most strikingly, Chechnya, by far the country’s most repressive region, saw its first protest since the ruthless strongman Ramzan Kadyrov came to power 15 years ago, when a few dozen women gathered outside a mosque to voice anger about their sons being drafted.

Many Russians have already voted with their feet, with the mobilisation leading to a surge in the number of men of military age leaving the country.

Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London and co-author of Putin v the People, said that with the call for mobilisation, Putin has “made the war a lot more real for people than it was before”.

“For many who were enthusiastic about the invasion, staying silent was still the preferred option, given the risks protesters face. But now, with the real possibility of being sent to the front, that calculus has changed.”

In his nightly speech last Thursday, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy decided to address Russians directly in their native language.

“Fifty-five thousand Russian soldiers died in this war in six months,” he said. “Tens of thousands are wounded and maimed. Want more? No? Then protest. Fight back. Run away. Or surrender to Ukrainian captivity. These are the options for you to survive.”