Yesterday, the lower house of Russian Parliament passed arguably the most cannibalistic bill of modern times.
The bill that’ll render roughly 100% conscription-age men draft dodgers,
and pretty much all bipedal males, too, when the new mobilization drive starts.
Before we enter the legal chicanery, let’s stress the bottomline: there’ll be no draft notices anymore.
Forget that word, alongside the epithet “electronic.”
Now you must show up at the enlistment office simply because you’re a man, and the military needs soldiers.
This bill is extremely hazardous, and doesn’t bode well for hundreds of thousands of people now and millions
in the foreseeable future.
Watch this video till the end.
We meticulously cleared it out of the nonsense self-proclaimed pundits had to say about the matter.
As is traditional, the new bill was passed on the sly, by amending the second reading to the bill
that has been dormant since 2018. Its degree of harm and danger, however, is unprecedented.
If you’re subscribed to my channel, you know the premise,
but let me remind you: the system of summoning to the military enlistment office has changed fundamentally.
From now on, they don’t need your signature on the notice paper delivered in person.
Now the relationship will advance unilaterally.
One, electronic draft notices have been legalized.
But despite the recent reports, it isn’t the biggest concern.
Two, it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen the notice: the status changes to “delivered” seven days after it’s been issued.
Three, paper notices don’t have to be delivered in person anymore, they can just be mailed to you.
Four, if you don’t show up at the enlistment office once the notice is deemed “delivered,” you become a draft dodger.
And five, draft dodgers will face immediate legal repercussions: they can’t leave the country,
take out loans, register businesses, deal with real estate, and operate vehicles.
Media outlets rushed to call it the “E-Draft Bill.” And so did we, but that was a mistake.
Because this bill is much worse. But let’s step back.
DRAFT NOTICE CANCELED
For starters, let’s describe the status quo. How has the conscription system worked over the past 25+ years?
Draft campaigns were held biannually; they targeted male citizens aged 18 through 27.
We expect the upper limit to hit 30 soon: the bill is being reviewed.
This goes for regular draft campaigns.
We’ll discuss mobilization later, because the immediate threat now is the draft campaign that kicked off on April 1.
Part of potential conscripts receive deferrals or even avoid conscription officially.
The lucky ones are full-time students, alumni of universities’ junior officer prep courses, and fathers of many children.
Also, residents of some remote areas in the Caucasus, the Far East, and the Far North,
where there’s no conscription whatsoever, or the target numbers are very limited.
If you weren’t a student or a father of many, if your residence wasn’t in the Far Northern wastelands,
and had no other legal grounds to avoid Uncle Vlad, you still had two workarounds.
The first one was to feign a medical condition.
Savvy parents who knew the Russian government machine for what it was and didn’t want to sacrifice
their offspring for its whims, prepared for the draft since they first saw their boy on the ultrasound.
They logged every sneeze, examined every scratch, and saved every X-ray scan.
By the age of 18, those kids had a medical history akin to The Forsyte Saga.
Such documents paint beefcakes rocking up at the enlistment offices as severely disabled
who belong in a hospice, not barracks.
Those whose parents weren’t that farsighted had to improvise on their own.
From buying doctor’s certificates or pulling the right strings to adhering to the
“There are no healthy people, there are underexamined ones” principle.
For if you have no lethal diagnosis, that means not enough medics have checked you out.
Some faked illnesses right at the enlistment offices. It doesn’t take a seasoned yogin to drive up one’s blood pressure.
Some prodigies even managed to fake seizures for an EEG scan.
The other way was to shun the existence of draft for as long as you were eligible to be conscripted.
This path used to be called “playing hide and seek.”
There was no athletic component to it, though: no one was really looking for you.
Men aged between 18 and 27 avoided getting draft notices in person.
They didn’t reside on their property, didn’t open doors to strangers, and ghosted the enlistment offices.
They instructed their parents to stage an act about a runaway son, should the officers ever show up at the doorstep.
“He’s gone, and not a single text from the bastard! He’s dead to us!”
The life of an outlaw came with minor inconveniences.
It wasn’t easy to obtain a foreign travel passport, land a job with a big company, or be issued loans, especially mortgages.
There was no shot at working for the government.
But all things considered, not that bad: apply for a foreign travel passport aged 17, and you’re golden.
Conscription was a malady one could rather cure or wait out with similar results.
So despite the general nationwide conscription, those who weren’t eager to join the ranks could arrange
it without breaking a sweat.
The art of dodging the military in Russia is at least 50 years old.
Our granddads forged medical histories for their kids, and passed those skills down.
Now they want to put an end to this glorious tradition.
The new bill introduces a legal fiction: a draft notice is considered delivered a week after
it has been entered into the electronic database.
It doesn’t matter if you saw it or if you disabled notifications in your profile.
You may as well be in a coma, that wouldn’t matter.
Thus, any male of military age with no ground to avoid the service who didn’t show up at the enlistment office
during the draft campaign is officially treated as a draft dodger. And he receives all the “perks” that come with such a status.
That’s why this bill isn’t about electronic draft notices. It’s about scrapping draft notices whatsoever.
Now your relationships with the military won’t kick off after your signature or a conversation with them.
They’ll start simply because it’s draft season, and you match the criteria. The law obligates you to know about it.
Some rushed everyone to delete their accounts on the government records website.
This tip does more harm than good. Let’s say it again.
It doesn’t matter how they send the draft notice — electronically or via registered mail — in seven days, it’s considered delivered.
Life abroad without an official government records profile, however, may come with challenges.
Try getting a police clearance certificate for a visa without it, for instance.
We’ll talk about a possible course of action in this plight, but first, here’s a non-commercial announcement. Don’t skip it.
NON-COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
TIME TO PANIC YET?
So, the regular draft campaign is ongoing, and according to the new regulations,
the draft notice is considered delivered a week after its issue. The question is, when is it time to panic?
Right now. The law will take effect from the moment of its publication.
This shouldn’t take long, given how helter-skelter the lower house has passed it.
The upper house will follow suit, and Putin will sign it into law. The bill may come into force in a matter of days.
Naturally, the mailing of electronic draft notices won’t come as fast, as they don’t seem
to have drawn up the unified register for it.
But the legal regulation will take effect immediately
If, upon receiving the notice by any means, you don’t show up at the enlistment office, you’ll be considered a draft dodger.
Again: this bill isn’t about electronic notices, it’s about eliminating any.
And there’s not a single phrasing in the bill that that would make the current draft campaign an exception.
CONSCRIPTS’ PROSPECTS
Is regular army service dangerous nowadays? As a rule of thumb, it’s always dangerous in Russia.
Hazing, physical abuse, starvation, and cranky commanders don’t constitute a perfect environment for physical
and mental health. The Russian army hasn’t ceased to model itself after the prison yard culture.
True, except for the first stage of the war, when conscripts were used to compensate for sudden shortages in the regular army,
we haven’t seen them being shipped to the frontline on a large scale yet.
There were exceptions, but they didn’t reflect the big picture.
The top brass seemed to be spooked by the number of young people’s obituaries.
It may change at the drop of a hat, but as of now, you aren’t facing the prospect of storming Bakhmut in a few days.
But you’re far from being safe. One, conscripts perform homefront duties in the frontline
Kursk, Bryansk, and Belgorod regions.
And these locations are targets for heavy Ukrainian artillery shelling.
Two, conscripts tend to be forced to join the contract army.
They aren’t tortured by oblong objects yet and aren’t locked up to coerce them into signing,
but peer pressure in a closed male circle can get harsh. Don’t overestimate your or your beloved ones’ abilities to resist it.
Three, there’s not a single legal restriction that would stop them from throwing conscripts
into mindless meatgrinder assaults tomorrow.
For the battles are fought on Russian soil, if the Russian Constitution is anything to go by.
It’s legal to send them to defend it.
As of now, this doesn’t happen due to Putin’s political anxiety and the Russian government’s word of honor.
I wouldn't bet a buck on it, let alone a life.
Four, any sort of contribution to the Russian military effort, whatever shape it takes, helps invading a foreign territory.
Don’t don Russian army uniform these days. Not only does it jeopardize your health and your future, it’s simply immoral.
Does the new bill address the mobilization drive? It does. Don’t listen to those who say otherwise.
The bill imposes no limits on types of draft, and only judicial practice will tell what applies to mobilization and what doesn’t.
The only difference between the regular conscription and the mobilization has nothing to do with the new bill.
This being criminal responsibility.
Draft evasion will result in criminal liability for conscripts, but this isn’t true for mobilization yet. You may face a $40 fine, though.
But all the fairytale perks listed in the new bill, including a ban on real estate transactions and driving a car,
may apply for those evading mobilization.
Or they may not. The Russian lawmakers stayed true to themselves and didn’t clarify it.
WHAT TO DO?
We warned you that the more the Russian government blows on the battlefield, the more dangerous it’ll become for its citizens.
That the tips we gave in September, which boiled down to avoiding draft notices, won’t be viable soon.
That your signature that prevents your rendezvous with a HIMARS is too obvious of a barrier to be eliminated.
If the mobilization drive continues — and the decree hasn’t been repealed — you’ll be subjected to the same legal gimmickry.
It won’t matter if a registered letter is sent to a decayed former residence, where you used to live in 1995.
It won’t matter if you’ve ever seen the draft notice.
You’ll find out from the first traffic police stop, when the officer bars you from driving as a draft dodger.
Last fall, dire consequences for you might have come only if you neglected simple safety rules, opened the door to a stranger,
and took some yuck from them.
You had to perform a certain action to become a draft dodger and hence prone to nabbing.
You had to sign something, go to the enlistment office, and so on. You don’t need to do anything now.
What to do when the situation has grown much more dangerous?
Which it has. What to do once you’ve run out of time? No matter if you’re a conscript or a potential mobilization target.
Weirdly enough, the new bill possibly has a loophole. It’s not guaranteed to work out, but it’s there.
The bill toughens everything, but introduces something new: one may deregister from the army reserve roster remotely,
without attending the enlistment office.
Theoretically, you may go overseas and do it from there.
But it’s not clear if this option will ever see the light of day.
One doesn’t have to leave forever. You may return and “forget” to re-enroll.
It won’t have any legal repercussions apart from a miniscule fine.
To leave now and deregister remotely seems like the best and safest course of action now.
But it’s too early to tell how ot will work.
In a nutshell, the safest choice for military-age men is to stay away from Russia, but it isn’t available for everyone.
As of now, it’s impossible to recommend anything for those who can’t leave, whatever the reasons,
except for the aforementioned tour of various hospitals.
We’ll have to watch the bill being implemented.
If all the promised restrictions come in force on a large scale, you’ll be have to live as big time debtors
or people in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings. The list of limitations is quite similar.
We’ll see how it goes, and compose a detailed guide for you. Meanwhile, we can imagine what your life may turn into.
You may end up like Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski,
slipping the rent money under the landlord’s door without checking with your accountant.
If all goes as stated in the bill, you won’t be forced to live on the wrong side of the law, but you’ll enter the gray zone.
How good is such a life? Not so great. Millions of people live it, though, so it’s doable.
Some even manage to run a sizable business despite lacking any formal property and rights.
Compared with the army, the front, the risk of giving away your life and health or killing anyone in the war of conquest,
any of these consequences are a walk in the park.
Even a potential felony charge for draft evasion carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison.
And according to judicial practice, you’re facing nothing worse than a fine.
All of 582 cases in 2022 resulted in fines, most below $300. Yes, such impunity may not last forever.
Yet, the legal consequences still pale in comparison to injury, death, and disgrace.
We literally discussed the political reasons for this situation yesterday.
The bill and its passing in the covert operation mode signal despair. That everything else works as a chocolate teapot.
The money offered and limitations lifted don’t bear any fruit.
A murderer with a bleeding knife may run from the crime scene to the enlistment office for shelter,
and yet, no one’s lining up in the lobby.
Let’s admit it: they have no choice but to go for the craziest bets to protract the inevitable.
And this isn’t the last bill that will poison our life and make it more dangerous.
This doesn’t change the obvious: anywhere else is safer than the front.
Don’t go to the enlistment office and don’t join the army!
See you tomorrow!