Russia-Ukraine war latest updates: anti-mobilisation protests in Dagestan; US warns of ‘decisive’ nuclear response | Russia
, 2022-09-26 01:27:09,
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Local military commandant in recruiting office shot in Siberia – reports
Andrew Roth
Andrew Roth reports for the Guardian from Moscow:
A Russian man has shot the local military commandant in a Siberian town after telling him he would refuse to fight in the war in Ukraine.
The incident took place in the city of Ust-Ilimsk, a town of about 85,000 people in the Irkutsk region in Siberia.
Video of the dramatic incident showed the man, dressed in camouflage, firing at the official from point blank range as other potential draftees for the Russian invasion fled from the room. Reports say that at least three shots were fired.
There are conflicting reports about whether the commandant, who also heads the local draft board, has died. Video showed him being carried from the building and placed onto a stretcher. He was not moving in the video. Irciti, a local media outlet, reports that he is in hospital in critical condition.
“Nobody is going to go anywhere,” the assailant said moments before opening fire, a witness told the Baikal People news outlet. Before that, the commandant, who also heads the local draft board, had gathered the men and “clumsily” given a pep talk about going to war.
Alex Rossi is the Sky News correspondent in Moscow. He has offered this analysis this morning, saying:
We’re now five days into this [mobilisation]. It doesn’t seem to really have gone down very well. Bear in mind that Russia, of course, is a very heavily securitised police state where dissent isn’t tolerated, but there have been sporadic protests all over the country.
The number of people that they’re trying to draft is 300,000. That’s almost double the initial invasion force. So it is a reflection of how badly things are going on the battlefield for the Kremlin, and just shows that they have a very significant manpower problem.
How these protests continue, we don’t know whether they will grow, there’s certainly the possibility of a really significant domestic backlash. Although they are small, it is significant that they’re happening at all, and that will be a serious worry for Vladimir Putin going forward.
The Tass news agency is reporting that in Rubizhne in occupied Luhansk, a polling station for the widely-derided referendum being held there by proxy Russian authorities has had to be moved to a reserve location after shelling from Ukrainian forces hit the…
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