Russia’s largest military call-up whips up fear among young men

On April 1, Russia began a new conscription drive with the goal of enlisting 160,000 military-age men between 18 and 30.

It is the largest such call-up since 2011, aiming to fulfil last year’s presidential decree to boost the armed forces to 2.5 million personnel.And it is making Bogdan, a 21-year-old on the outskirts of Moscow, nervous.

Some young men often try to avoid mandatory military service. But as Russia’s war against Ukraine stands at a critical juncture, with the rival sides desperately attempting to appear triumphant amid peace talks, there is a particular urgency to the matter.

“I received a summons to be drafted in the spring of 2024, despite my hypertension. And by the autumn the police were searching to forcibly conscript me,” Bogdan told Al Jazeera, requesting to withhold his surname fearing reprisal.

He is currently hiding from the authorities.

“I hope that I will be able to register for military service in Saint Petersburg, undergo a new medical examination there and receive a military [exception] due to hypertension. Because in Moscow and the Moscow region, no complaints and court hearings have yielded results. In Moscow, they do not allow me to undergo a new medical examination and want to enlist me according to my summons.”Rights advocates have warned that the cracks which one might have earlier been able to slip through are tightening, while being a conscript is increasingly risky.

“A year ago there was an age amendment, and now summons are issued to young people from 18-30 years old,” Ivan Chuviliaev, spokesman for the organisation Go By The Forest, which helps people escape the ranks, told Al Jazeera.

Previously, the maximum age for conscription was 27.“Now the decision of the draft board will be valid not until the end of the draft, but for a whole year. This means it won’t be as easy to run away by simply not showing up when you receive the summons. [Another] major change is that they’re revising the list of illnesses of those ineligible for military service,” Chuviliaev said.

“Those conditions they wouldn’t accept before, they now accept. It’s clear this is simply an artificial creation of chaos, so that doctors will simply stamp Category A fitness for everyone without bothering to dig through their papers. [Thirdly,] various sanctions will be imposed for failure to appear in response to a summons, such as a ban on taking out loans, a ban on opening an individual enterprise, a ban on leaving the country, and so on and so forth.”

According to an open-source tally compiled by the BBC and independent Russian outlet Mediazona, more than 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since 2022 – a figure that frightens young men like Bogdan.