It’s been less than a week since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his mass mobilization to shore up his flailing war in Ukraine, but Russian state television hosts are reportedly already in a “panic” over potential blowback.
The Daily Beast’s Julia Davis, who monitors and translates Russian state TV broadcasts, reports that Putin-backing media figures Vladimir Solovyov and Margarita Simonyan were despondent this past weekend over the state of the mobilization.
Simonyan was particularly angry that many people with no military experience at all were being called up to fight in Ukraine, as well as men aged up to 62 years old.
Solovyov, meanwhile, fumed over news reports that a musician suffering from a serious illness had been drafted by a vengeful recruiter for supposedly registering a complaint against him in the past.
Solovyov also raged at photos of rusty old weapons that were being given to some recruits — and said the Russian military would be crazy to believe they could keep any of this a secret.
“All of them have phones and they won’t stay silent,” he said. “If they’re being handed rotten things, if they have no helmets, no body armor, no one is going to hide it… I will tell you very politely: don’t play games with people… This isn’t some liberal riff-raff, these are our people and I refuse to be silent about it.”
Simonyan went even further and warned that Russia’s armed forces faced the prospect of a mutiny like the one that famously took place in 1905 on the Battleship Potemkin.
“Let me remind you that in 1905, small things like these led to the first mutiny of an entire military unit in the history of our country,” she said. “Is that what you want?”
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