Putin Is Suddenly Facing a Second Front

A derailed tanker train burns. A bombed military draft office smolders. A hooded figure runs into the night, leaving behind a Molotov cocktail burning at the base of a Lenin bust. These images are not from Ukraine, but rather from Russia’s little known republics.In a series of videos — from Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Kalmykia, Sakha, Tartarstan, and Tuva — speakers appeal to their various countrymen to defect from the Russian Army and to come home and fight for independence of their indigenous homelands.Prepared by Ukraine’s UATV Freedom channel, six 30-minute videos illuminate how the Ukraine war is sparking another headache for President Putin: a potential second front of secessionist movements across what is, by area, the world’s largest nation. This is occurring as Russia’s mercenary chief is calling for armed rebellion against the country’s defense minister.During the Cold War, Moscow was happy to dismantle the British, French, and Portuguese empires by arming and training African liberation movements. Now the rulers of Europe’s last empire face various national and religious minorities speaking the language of decolonization.“The Russian Federation is not a federation but a colonial state,” Tuvan activist Sholbaany Kuular says in a video posted yesterday. Asserting that a Tuvan man is eight times more likely to die in Ukraine than a man from Moscow, she says: “Putin is waging war with the hands of indigenous people.”From Tatarstan, a political scientist Leyla Tatypova, says: “This is an absolutely criminal, colonial war against sovereign Ukraine…We should not forget that we are also a colonized nation.”From Bashkortostan, activist Aygul Layon, says: “This is not our war…Putin is killing two birds with one stone. He is destroying us, while he tries to expand the Russian empire to Ukraine and on to Europe.”Such radical rhetoric seems to be prompted by four factors: an unpopular draft that targets national and religious minorities; a demographic shift where Russians have fallen to minority status in many republics; the feeling that resource rich republics subsidize Moscow; and the spreading belief that Ukraine’s resistance to Russia offers the best chance in a century for Russia’s myriad republics to win independence.The national draft announced last September by Mr. Putin was a shock to many living thousands of miles from Ukraine. Maya Vasilieva, an Evenk from Sakha, recalls that military helicopters landed in remote villages, rousted young men from their sleep, and flew them away.Protests of women in Sakha’s capital Yakutsk were so large — and local police deemed so unreliable — that National Guard troops were flow in Moscow to put down protests.“Russia is an empire which fights with the forces of its colonies,” Buryat activist Evgeniya Baltatarova says. “They don’t dare touch Moscow. They don’t dare touch St. Petersburg.” Buryatia, Kalmykia, and Tuva are Russia’s three historically Buddhist republics. Kalmyk activist Daaur Dorzhin says: “We are a peace-loving state.”Three of the republics profiled are net contributors to the budget of the Russian Federation. Bashkortostan and Tatarstan are major oil producers. Sakha, with a population of only 1 million scattered over an area four times the size of Texas produces coal, gold, and diamonds.“Moscow lives at our expense,” says Sargylana Kondakova, co-founder of the Free Yakutia Fund.The shock of the military draft has prompted the kinds of teach-ins and radicalization that the Vietnam war provoked in America in the 1960s, though the similarity is only in form. In the case of the Russian Federation today, activists willing to go on camera seem to be the tip of an iceberg of discontent, fomented,in part by the informal teaching of a revisionist history of 17th-century conquests by “Muscovy.”In an apparent response from discontent from minorities, Russia’s Duma approved a bill that allows the Army to recruit prisoners, offering amnesty in return from military service.With Russia’s Army cut in half by its invasion of Ukraine, several militants say the timing is right to break ties with Moscow. Several say their republics should have rebelled in the 1990s, when Chechnya fought two wars for independence.“If we had agreed with Chechnya, with Tatarstan, Moscow would not have had enough power against three republics,” a young Sakha activist, Nyurgun Antonov, told a Ukrainian interviewer in the Nations Project series. Another Sakha activist, Dmitry Pavlov, agreed, saying: “We should have left, we should have supported Ichkeria (Chechnya).”In the revisionist history taught underground in the republics, teachers warn that Moscow will always follow a divide and conquer strategy and will inevitably break its promises for autonomy.“If one day Putin croaks, Bashkiria will not gain independence peacefully,” says an exile activist from Bashkortostan, Ruslan Gabbasov. “The repression will continue, unless a revolution comes from within and Russia falls apart.”Each video in the series ends with an appeal to soldiers to defect to the Ukrainian Army from the Russian Army. The goal would be to learn military skills that could be used to free republics from Moscow’s control. For potential independence fighters, viewers are told that a kind of underground railroad is taking men through Kazakhstan, Turkey, and onto Ukraine.“We will create guerrilla groups and fight against the Moscow occupiers,” says the self-identified “deputy prime minister of the Tatarstan government in exile.”“Stop fighting against Ukraine,” Kalmyk activist Vladimir Dovdanov says. “Ukraine will win anyway…We will form military units with which we will enter Kalmykia and liberate it.”To skeptics, independence talk might seem quixotic. In 1959, though, President Eisenhower signed into law “Captive Nations Week,” a time to remember 22 countries controlled by Communist governments. Eisenhower said of Moscow: “Of course they don’t admit there are any captive nations. They have their own propaganda. They present a picture to their own peoples, including the world, so far as they can, that we know is distorted and is untrue.”At the height of the Cold War, the outlook for these peoples seemed hopeless. Thirty years later, though, 14 of the countries became free of Moscow’s control. This year, Captive Nations Week is set for the week of July 11.

Putin Is Suddenly Facing a Second Front

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