Putin’s Top Cheerleaders Panic Over Russian Army ‘Mutiny’
Putin’s Top Cheerleaders Panic Over Russian Army ‘Mutiny’
‘DON’T ANGER THE PEOPLE’
Two of Putin’s most strident supporters are freaking out about the disastrous mass mobilization efforts, which they fear could lead to a major revolt against the war in Ukraine.
Julia Davis
Updated Sep. 26, 2022 4:34PM ET / Published Sep. 26, 2022 11:44AM ET
Listen to article8 minutes
Russia’s “partial mobilization” cast another shadow on the already dire situation its Armed Forces are facing in Ukraine. The situation is so grotesque that even Russian President Vladimir Putin’s biggest cheerleaders find themselves trashing the way the mobilization is being conducted.
Top pro-Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov and head of RT Margarita Simonyan spent much of the broadcast of the state TV show Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov complaining about the issues with the mobilization. Solovyov said, “There are panicked calls on my phone, on Margarita’s phone, which shows that a number of people involved have forgotten how to do their jobs.”
Simonyan added that after listening to Putin’s announcement and the follow-up message from Russia’s Defense Ministry, she was under the impression that only people with prior military experience were subject to mobilization—but that’s not what happened. RT’s head said that she knows many people with prior combat experience, but none of them received any call-up notices.
She angrily recounted numerous instances where the new recruits included students, those outside the age limit, people with serious illnesses, barbers, teachers, musicians, and a single mother of two young children. Among the people swept up in the mobilization efforts, Solovyov and Simonyan recounted seeing information about draftees as old as 62 and 59 years of age.
Solovyov brought up another egregious instance in which a severely ill musician was mobilized in Novosibirsk, prompting Senator Alexander Karelin to intervene. The recruiter explained that he drafted the musician because he previously made some sort of complaint against him. The host also mentioned an instance of rusty automatic weapons being distributed to new recruits, angrily questioning why that was done. Simonyan chimed in to say that these “small things” have a major impact on people.
“We thought that all of this could be accomplished with much less blood an
